Rememberance Day: recovering lost histories

As a dusty road in France weaves its way through First World War battlefields towards La Bassée, the curious traveller comes across the Neuve Chapelle war memorial dedicated "TO THE HONOUR OF THE ARMY OF INDIA WHICH FOUGHT IN FRANCE AND BELGIUM, 1914-1918".

In north Pakistan, a faded little plaque in the village of Lehri commemorates the 391 men from the village who went to the war. In the sound archives of the Humboldt-University in Berlin, one can hear the desolate sound-recording of Mall Singh, an Indian prisoner of war in Germany, pining to go home. In an old house just outside Calcutta, one comes across the bloodstained glasses and a faded picture of a young Bengali doctor, killed in France in December 1914.

India contributed around 1.4 million men to the imperial war effort. They served not just in France and Belgium, but in Mesopotamia, Palestine, Persia, East Africa, Gallipoli and in the Far East. Yet, these men and their stories have largely been written out of the ‘Great War and modern memory’.

In September 1914, when the British ‘King Emperor’ sent a message to the ‘Princes and Peoples of my Indian empire’, the responses in India were largely enthusiastic. The native princes almost started competing with each other with extravagant offers of money. More surprising was the support of the educated middle-classes and the political bourgeoisie, including the Indian National Congress. Mahatma Gandhi pledged "absolute unconditional and wholehearted cooperation with the Government". Like his Irish or Jamaican brethren, he believed—as did the majority of Indians—that the present sacrifice would later be rewarded with greater political recognition and autonomy.

But beyond the national discourse and official archives lies an alternative subcutaneous, but equally powerful, layer of memory. In the villages of Punjab, which supplied more than 50 percent of the soldiers, First World War memory survives through family histories and mournful folksongs sung by the women when their men left them for the battlefields. "Without you I feel lonely here ...War destroys towns and ports, it destroys huts/I shed tears" goes one song, recently excavated and translated by the distinguished Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan. Last year, I interviewed the Punjabi novelist Mohan Kahlon whose two grand-uncles perished in Mesopotamia during the war, and their mother went mad with grief; in their village, their house came to be known as ‘garod’ or the ‘asylum’.

In September and October 1914, the first two Indian divisions, totalling around 24,000 men, arrived at Marseilles to the cries of ‘Vive les Hindus’. Over the next four years, India sent to France some 138,608 men, including both combatants and non-combatants. In an ironic reversal of Joseph Conrad’s vision, these 'coloured' men were voyaging to the 'heart of whiteness', as it were, to witness "The horror! The horror!" of Western warfare. They took part in the battles at Neuve Chapelle, Festubert and Loos, served with distinction and won some of the first Victoria Crosses to be awarded to Indians. On the other hand, the largest number of Indians sent overseas, some 588,717 men, served in Mesopotamia.

What do we know about the inner world of these hundreds of thousands of sepoys? Recruited from the semi-literate, peasant-warrior classes of northern India, these men have not left behind the thousands of letters, diaries and memoirs that form the cornerstone of British war memory. But what we have instead are censored letters. These letters, dictated or written in the native languages by the troops, were translated into English for the censors and ironically the English language extracts are what survive today. These letters open up a whole new world in First World War history, with the emotions ranging from a sense of metaphysical wonder at the modernity of France—"Each house is a sample of Paradise"—through comments on the French people or the occasional thrilling account of romance and sex to the trauma of the war: "As tired bullocks and bull buffaloes lie down at the end of monsoon, so lies the weary world. Our hearts are breaking".

Some letters even contain ingenious codes to hoodwink the censors, as in the following letter from Bugler Mausa Ram in the Kitchener’s Indian Hospital: "The state of affairs is as follows: the black pepper is finished. Now the red pepper is being used, but occasionally the black pepper proves useful. The black pepper is very pungent and the red pepper is not so strong." ‘Black pepper’ and ‘red pepper’ refer to Indian and European troops respectively, an advice against further recruitment.

Much less is known about the Indian experience in Mesopotamia. Thus the recently unearthed letters of Captain Dr Kalyan Mukherjee, a Cambridge-educated doctor who served with the Indian forces under General Townshend and perished in Mesopotamia, are singularly valuable. After dressing some horribly wounded soldiers, he writes to his mother: "England has been our main educator. The patriotism that England has so long taught us along and other Western nations upheld as well, it is this patriotism which is responsible for all this bloodshed. All patriotism is about usurping other nations—and to build empire…. And following England’s example, misguided youths of our country are taking recourse to violence, bombing innocent people. Shame on patriotism! Unless this narrow vision is abolished this bloodshed in the name of patriotism will continue." In Mukherjee’s account, Western imperialism, Indian nationalism and the First World War are all shown to be linked in a vicious cycle of violence, fuelled by patriotism. The level of intellectual sophistication and emotional poignancy places him not with the semi-literate sepoys of the Raj but perhaps more with British soldier-officers such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

As we approach the centenary of the start of the conflict in another few years, there is a great need to break out of the eurocentric mould of First World War memory and recover the lives of the non-white colonial troops and recognise their contribution. More words have perhaps been written on the poetry of Owen and Sassoon than on all of these lives from Asia, Africa and the Pacific taken together. Responsible recovery of fresh material and experiences in dusty archives in different countries will help a fresh understanding of the modern memory of the war not solely as a European tragedy but the multi-racial and international catastrophe it was.