INDIANS AT WAR
AAt the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the “guns of August” finally fell silent in many parts of the world, bringing to an end one of the most destructive wars in the human history. The First World War resulted in over 8.5 million military and 13 million civilian casualties and marked the beginning of the end of the age of empires, including the British Raj in India. In the wake of the global centenary commemorations of the armistice, and the renewed interest in the subject, three new books offer fresh perspectives on the considerable Indian contribution to the conflict.
George Morton-Jack skilfully presents the reader with the first comprehensive telling of the Indian story and places it in a global context. Santanu Das and Rakhshanda Jalil go beyond the narrative of guns and battles and reach deeper into cultural folds to unravel the impact of the war on the Indian psyche, using a variety of previously unexamined sources. All three books draw on hitherto unexplored strands of memory to elucidate a long and twisting tale.
Santanu Das, who has emerged as one of the foremost academic scholars of the Indian presence in the First World War, outdoes himself in his sensitive and nuanced examination of the literary and cultural aspects of the war through the experiences of an array of people within India and abroad. The book is a benchmark in placing the unexamined colonial histories at par with the far better understood cultural historiography of the western participants. His examination of the use of war memory and commemoration in the recent past is outstanding for the questions it raises. The work is breathtaking in its scope and depth and is an invaluable addition to Indian writings on the war. The book is a sine qua non for those who wish to gain a nuanced understanding of the Indian experience of the Great War from a multiplicity of perspectives.
Morton-Jack’s work is magisterial and yet immensely readable. This is the book for anyone interested in an authentic broad-based account of the role played by India and its soldiers in the defining conflict of the 20th century. He tells the tale in a chronological sequence and follows the triumphs and travails of the Indian soldier from the battlefields of France and Flanders to Gallipoli, East Africa, Egypt, Palestine and Mesopotamia to the PoW camps of Germany. The book is remarkable in having used, for the first time, thousands of pages of interview transcripts of Indian veterans of the war, recorded in the 1970s.
Jalil presents a bouquet of Indian prose and poetry on the theme of the war. The prose consists of collected essays or selected excerpts from Indian writings, but it is with the verse that she does great service by providing a collection of poems in Urdu and English, fulfilling a long-felt need for such an anthology.