Abstract
If India's ‘contribution’ to the First World War was once largely forgotten this ceased to be true long before the deluge of centenary publishing gathered momentum. It is therefore all the more remarkable that Santanu Das's India, Empire and First World War Culture offers such a rich, and illuminating, reading of this now largely familiar story.
The book ranges widely along the tributaries which ferried men and materiel from across South Asia to the battlefields and brothels of the western front and from there to British hospitals and German PoW camps; to Mesopotamia, arguably the only part of India's First World War experience which remains largely overlooked; and into the interwar period, to show how the war and its legacies lived on as South Asia was transformed by the emergence of anti-colonial nationalism. The book shows brilliantly how ‘porous’ the boundaries between imperial war service and nationalist critique were: as for Kazi Nazrul Islam – an anti-colonial rebel poet and now the national poet of Bangladesh – whose career ‘was forged on the anvil of imperial war service’ (p. 335).
The tensions between – and the inadequacy of – imperial and nationalist framings of the war are powerfully explored in Part I, on the imperial home front. By teasing out the multiple and contradictory forces which shaped patterns of recruiting and enlisting, and mapping how the effects of service were felt across north India, Das offers a nuanced reading of subaltern agency and its costs. He illuminates the enormous variety of South Asian experiences of and investments in the war: thus, for example, while Gandhi proselytized on behalf of the colonial state, imploring peasants to enlist to ‘give us honour and manhood’ (p. 61), some villagers attacked overeager recruiters, killing several. While the princes laid their resources at the service of the state, Indian officers smarted at the racism they encountered in service.
Parts II and III, on representation and experience, respectively, further nuance our understandings of the sepoys and their followers. Photographs, sketches, songs and letters reveal the humour, intimacy and camaraderie of wartime service, as well as its horrors. Das's reading of these ‘sensuous evocations’ of the war explores the ‘underworld marked by fear and resourcefulness’ (p. 218) in which subaltern agency was expressed in small acts of resistance and intimacy.
The account of the Mesopotamia campaigns is similarly valuable – both for enriching our understandings of the campaigns themselves (the largest deployments of Indian troops during the war) but also for re-casting the war as a clash of multi-ethnic, multireligious and multilingual empires. Exploring ‘peripheral visions’ of the conflict powerfully underscores how inadequate the nation state is for understanding the war in the Middle East: encounters between Indian prisoners and wounded Turkish soldiers – ‘kardes (brothers)’ (p. 269) – remind us how much the antagonists shared. The cosmopolitan, plural identities of colonial subjects on both sides confounded rationales for the conflict, helping to explain why the strains of global war tested first the Ottoman and then the British Empire to destruction.
Across each of the book's four parts, Das brings texts, images and objects into productive dialogue. With keen, literary attention to content and form and juxtaposing an impressive variety of new archival material alongside more familiar accounts, Das shows how the largely illiterate sepoys produced a distinctively Indian ‘literature of the trenches’ (pp. 212–213) in which metaphor rendered industrial warfare in relation to agriculture and religion, and allusive references to sex and romance, along with coded warnings against enlistment, were concealed in letters home. Through these Das builds up a textured and empathetic account of South Asian experiences of the war.
The book also highlights striking commonalities in the human experience of the conflict. While Indian recruits were ethnological curiosities for French civilians and German academics, so too were the peoples of Europe and Mesopotamia for those Indians who served. Extending Claude Markovits's ‘Occidentalism from below’, Das shows how the gaze of Indian troops was inflected by ideas of class, community and race, producing subaltern accounts of the Middle East which shared much in common with ethnological texts produced by colonial officers in India during the late nineteenth century.
As these few examples may suggest, India, Empire and First World War Culture is a dense and immersive work. If the book is, in one sense, rather ‘late’ for the centenary, it is all the more timely for it: as the Afterword notes, while the centenary commemorations helped to transform the ‘colour of war memory’ (p. 414), they did so partly by flattening and sanitising the ‘Indian contribution’. This book provides a wonderfully rich and wide-ranging rejoinder to that flattening, centring the messiness and plurality of shared wartime experiences in a colourful and eclectic collection of deeply human stories.
In evoking the potent, sensuous effects of global, industrial conflict, as well as the multiple sensibilities which informed and were shaped by the war, Das significantly extends our understandings, illustrating how valuable work at the intersections of history, culture and literature can be. While digressions into fiction and verse may frustrate some readers, scholars of war interested in the effects of conflict on human beings – and on our histories – should read this book carefully.