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 beginningMalik’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 Indians seeking military commissions, rendering Malik’s rejection almost inevitable.Undeterred, and with the help of his influential Oxford tutor, Francis Fortescue Urquhart – known affectionately as “Sligger” – he found another way to the front by joining the French Red Cross as an ambulance driver and being posted to Cognac, where he ferried wounded soldiers from the war front and watched the air war unfolding overhead.Malik’s arrival at RAFThis experience sparked his fascination with flying, and he applied to the French Aéronautique Militaire, where he was accepted for fighter pilot training. When Urquhart learnt of this, he intervened with Major-General David Henderson, head of Britain’s Royal Flying Corps, arguing that if the French were prepared to train Malik as a military pilot, there was no reason for the British to refuse him. The intervention worked: Malik was brought into the RFC in April 1917 as a subaltern, an extraordinary breakthrough for an Indian seeking a place in its officer ranks.Subsequently, Malik’s introduction to flying the Sopwith Camel F.1 fighters was extraordinarily rapid. The single-seat, open-cockpit biplane armed with twin synchronised .303-inch Vickers machine guns firing through the propeller arc was fast, highly manoeuvrable and notoriously tricky to handle. Yet, Malik recalled receiving only a few hours of instruction before being sent solo and, barely 10 hours later, being declared fit for operational flying soon after. But becoming an RFC pilot presented another, rather more unusual, problem for the Sikh from Rawalpindi, as he refused to surrender his turban. As a schoolboy, Malik had already spent years fending off the curiosity of his mates at Clifton, who were fascinated by the “peculiarly tied piece of cloth” on his head, and were forever trying to topple it and discover what lay beneath.And, once again in the RFC, the turban once posed a major challenge, as it collided with flying regulations, which required pilots to wear protective helmets.After prolonged discussions, Malik was permitted to retain his turban – but only if he wore a helmet over it. The solution was characteristically Malik: he repaired to a well-known hatter in London’s Piccadilly and had an outsized flying helmet made specially to fit over his turban. He wore it thereafter while flying, and the extraordinary ensemble earned him the nickname “the Flying Hobgoblin.”The turbaned, black-bearded newcomer Furthermore, Malik’s overall appearance caused further consternation when he joined his unit. Aviation writer and historian Graham Wallace, best known for his 1957 history R.A.F. Biggin Hill, recalled Malik’s arrival at the station and the commotion that followed the next morning, when a batman duly arrived at his room with shaving water to give the new officer his customary morning shave. Instead, he encountered the turbaned, black-bearded newcomer, recoiled in alarm and fled, pursued by a torrent of Punjabi invective that, doubtlessly, haunted him for days afterwards. Such uproarious episodes concerning Malik’s turban abounded. Once, after being admitted to hospital with wartime injuries, a nurse preparing to anaesthetise him was unnerved by the formidable Sikh in her care. Other officers had apparently given her a dire warning that whatever she did, she was not to disturb his turban. They had even mischievously added, with the solemnity of an established military regulation, that any woman who messed with Malik’s headgear would find herself obliged to marry him on the spot. The already apprehensive nurse, Malik recalled, took the warning seriously and left his turban entirely untouched. But beneath the comedy and burlesque was a formidable young pilot, soon operating over the turbulent Western Front. In November 1917 came the most dramatic episode of his wartime career, when Malik joined a four-aircraft RFC mission led by Captain William Barker V.C., one of the Corps’ most decorated pilots. Barker had secured permission to lead the sortie in the hope of intercepting Germany’s most coveted aerial prize: the legendary Manfred von Richthofen, better known as the Red Baron, credited with 80 aerial victories and renowned for his bright-red Fokker Dr.I triplane and formidable skills as a tactician and dogfighter. His exploits had inspired countless books, films and comics, but the generation for whom the Red Baron was a living memory has long since disappeared.As the four Camels flew low through the wintry skies towards the German lines, Malik gave Barker the thumbs-up – the signal that he was ready. Decades later, Malik recalled with clarity that as they approached the German lines, they suddenly encountered a formation of enemy aircraft and their planned hunt instantly morphed into a savage dogfight.In the uneven engagement, where controlling the Camel’s heavy, wing-warping system without ailerons demanded extraordinary physical and mental agility, Malik managed to account for one German aircraft before being hit twice in the right leg. German machine-gun fire also riddled his main fuel tank, and with more than 50 miles of hostile territory between him and the British lines, Malik switched to the emergency fuel supply in the wing and made for home.German fighters pursued him, raking his crippled Camel with more machine gun fire. His right leg was a bloody mess and, as he later said, he was convinced he would not survive. Yet, he continued flying and only when he was within a few miles of his home base did his German pursuers finally break off and disappear. Within minutes, Malik crash-landed and crawled from the wreckage, and sometime later, after recovering, counted each of the bullet holes in his Sopwith. “There were 403,” he recalled, with the characteristic smile that accompanied even his most hair-raising recollections. Years later, the German Ambassador to New Delhi presented Malik with a model of the Red Baron’s famous fighter. The former RFC pilot returned the compliment in his own fashion: he revealed that two German bullets fired during the wartime action decades earlier remained lodged in his right calf.Wartime adventuresMalik’s wartime adventures, however, were not confined to combat. Until his demobilisation in 1918, he displayed a pronounced instinct for the mischievous and the slightly outrageous, and delighted in recounting how his very presence could unsettle people who had never before encountered a Sikh.Shortly after the Armistice, when Allied pilots had been forbidden to fly, Malik decided that the rules could perhaps be interpreted flexibly and he decided to ‘nip across’ to France to see a girl he knew, who had had a rough time during the war. His excursion ended at Commercy in north-eastern France, where engine trouble forced him to land at an American unit deployed in the area. The moment he climbed out of his aircraft, he found himself surrounded by wide-eyed American GIs who had apparently never seen a Sikh before, and Malik reckoned that only the RFC markings on his machine prevented them from shooting this strange, bearded apparition in a turbaned flying helmet. What followed became one of Malik’s favourite after-dinner tales, which he would recount with particular relish during his later postings as India’s High Commissioner to Canada and, subsequently, as Trade Commissioner in New York. The unit’s commanding officer at Commercy, he reminisced, was a white American officer from the Deep South, in an era when racial prejudice was deeply entrenched across America. During their conversation over drinks and dinner, Malik, never notably restrained by diplomatic discretion, proceeded to give his host an earful about racial bigotry in the US, much to the chagrin of his prejudiced host. The conversation eventually wound its way to the colonel’s quarters, where they encountered an unexpected problem: there was only one bed between the two officers.Politeness and officer-like behaviour took over, producing an impasse.Neither man was prepared to take the bed while consigning the other to the less comfortable couch, and each insisted that the other should have it. The colonel, out of Southern hospitality, would not hear of his guest sleeping on the sofa; Malik, equally determined to observe the courtesies of a guest, refused to displace his host. After much futile insistence, there was only one solution left: they shared the bed.“Here was a man,” Malik recalled with a chuckle, “coloured by his upbringing and racial attitude, sharing the bed with a brown Asian.” On another occasion, Malik’s irreverence took a more direct route to the enemy.Flying almost at treetop level over a German position, he dropped a pair of fur-lined flying boots and the German soldiers below, startled by the mysterious object hurtling towards them, dived for cover. After a pregnant pause, the Germans emerged, retrieved the boots and discovered Malik’s message attached to them: “Try these for cold feet.”More than a century later, another Sikh fighter pilot earning his RAF wings is a reminder of just how far the service – and Britain and the RAF itself – has travelled since Malik first had to fight his way into its ranks. The two men, separated by over a century of service, are linked by a cockpit, a turban and a tradition of defying expectations: Malik the pioneer who forced his way in, and Dang the inheritor of a door he helped open.