A hundred years on, it’s open season on First World War histories. Each combatant nation is giving its battle honours a deserved airing. Australia and New Zealand look back proudly at Gallipoli, the Canadians at Vimy Ridge, and the Americans at Meuse-Argonne. Moreover, the war is owned by the Tommies, Fritzes and Poilus. In India and the First World War, Vedica Kant points out India’s stupendous contributions, including one-and-a-half million participants and over 70,000 casualties. How then can we account for the pall of silence surrounding the Indian experience in the war?
The Great War was an imperial war, and the Indian efforts retain a whiff of mercenariness. Secondly, the Western Front—where Indians had had a brief show—is the marquee front in war historiography. The Indian effort has thus been relegated to footnotes. Finally, most British-officered sepoys were illiterate, explaining the lack of first-person accounts—the raw material of history. The Indian experience has to be reconstructed from thousands of letters written (and dictated) by soldiers. Kant, with an approach that focuses on colonialism, ‘sepoy-sahib’ ties and fissures therein, and its impact back home, steps in to redress the disbalance of memory.
The Indian regiments that started disembarking in France in September 1914 were fed into the opening maw of trench warfare, with the force-multipliers of heavy artillery and sub-zero temperatures. The badly clothed and badly equipped Indian troops earned their battle honours soon, especially at Neuve Chapelle (March 1915), and suffered from acute kriegschmerz. Kant focuses her lens elsewhere. This was the first time a considerable body of Indians had visited a western country, and this led them to reflect on aspects of foreignness—custom, economy, politics, education, status of women, and led them to cast a new eye on colonial authority.
For many soldiers, France was a site for sentimental education too. French women, unlike the memsahib, were freer with their charms; the French were looser than the British in policing their women, and many were smitten. The authorities were chafed enough to put in prohibitory orders. The chaperoning of Indians continued at Brighton, where five hospitals—notably, the Brighton Pavilion—catered to the Indian wounded. Medical care was exemplary, and afforded the British a chance to show how well they treated their subjects. The lucky few (around 2,000) taken prisoner by the Germans and interned at the Half-Moon camp at Wunsdorf were used as pawns in anti-British propaganda.
Because of the availability of written accounts, Kant’s most engaging chapter is on the Mesopotamian campaign, in which most Indian combatants died. The contours are well-known: early success, Gen Townshend’s ambitious creep to Baghdad, siege and capitulation at Kut-al-Amara, and finally the dread march of POWs to Syria and Turkey.
But Kant’s chapters are mere interludes. The glory of the book is its visual content: wartime postcards, adverts for recruitment, sketches, cartoons and photographs. While photos of Indian troops at soldiering (drills, marching, cooking, cleaning, on parade), at play, rest and in recuperation in France, Brighton and Wunsdorf seem natural enough, the undeniable novelty of a body of Indians in Europe also seems to have animated photographers’ hands. Most are posed; some, like a series on the Manipuri labour battalion, and Sikh POWs in Germany, have a distinct ethnographic air about them. Those shot in the grime of Mesopotamia are more realistic, but stop short of depicting their suffering. One wonders if Passchendaele could fully be understood without its photos.
One shortcoming of Kant’s book, photographic and textual, is that it draws the reader away from the one thing that took the legions abroad—the fighting itself. ‘Action photos’ are few. (Pictured above, the Hodson’s Horse on a charge in France, is an exception.) There’s not much on individual battles and units’ impact on the campaigns. To be fair, Kant has focused on the socio-political and cultural impact; this is no military history.
In a brilliant epilogue, Kant sums up the effect of the war on India. As the country cowered under price rise and famine, agrarian unrest and a repressive Defence of India Act fanned revolutionary fervour. It was India’s contribution to the war effort that led the British to accept, in theory, self-government for India.
Kant has chosen to look in the gaps and silences that lie underneath the din of a world war, and expertly exhumed from the depths of quietude a hidden pattern of our colonial history.
