IMPERIAL JOLT: MASS GRAVES FOR ASIAN SOLDIERS
ANGER AS COMMISSION REPORT REVEALS DOUBLE STANDARDS IN REMEMBERANCE OF BRITISH ARMY’S COMMONWEALTH SOLDIERS
INDIAN soldiers who gave their lives for Britain in the First World War were often buried in unmarked mass graves in Mesopotamia and in Africa, a report published last week by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission has revealed.
An inquiry was set up in December 2019 to review “historical inequalities in commemoration” following a TV documentary by the Labour MP David Lammy.
Research on the history of the Imperial War Graves Commission – it was renamed the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) in 1960 – found that while memorials in war cemeteries invariably had the names of white British soldiers inscribed in stone on them, frequently only the number of Indians who had died in battle was mentioned.
While it is believed that most of the names of the Indian soldiers exist somewhere in army records – these are now being added to memorials – the situation involving African soldiers and labourers is very different. The names of between 116,000 and 350,000 Africans may have been lost for ever.
It appears that in the highest reaches of the armed forces and the colonial administration, there was a view that the same standards did not always have to be extended to Indian and African soldiers.
The report says: “The Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) was founded in 1917 to commemorate in perpetuity the men and women of the British Empire who lost their lives in the First World War.
“It would extend its charter to incorporate just one other conflict, the Second World War, and now – more than a century since it was established – it preserves the memory of more than 1.7 million Commonwealth citizens who died in those struggles. It does this by maintaining cemeteries and memorials at more than 23,000 sites across the globe.”
The report says “the Indian Army alone provided more than 1.2 million men, with its soldiers deployed to all the main theatres of the war, and making up two-thirds of all the manpower serving in Mesopotamia”.
Mesopotamia occupies the area of present-day Iraq and Kuwait, and parts of Iran, Syria, and Turkey.
This report finds that “in the 1920s, across Africa, the Middle East and India, imperial ideology influenced the operations of the IWGC in a way that it did not in Europe, and the rules and principles that were sacred there were not always upheld elsewhere.
“As a result, contemporary attitudes towards non-European faiths and differing funerary rites, and an individual’s or group’s perceived ‘state of civilisation’, influenced their commemorative treatment in death.”
One principle established right at the outset was that the fallen would not be repatriated to Britain since it was felt only the rich would be able to do so. Rudyard Kipling, who wrote a poem, My Boy Jack, lamenting the loss of his own son, became literary adviser to the IWGC. His description of those buried without being identified was, ‘Known unto God’.
In 1919, he noted that “... the treatment of the bodies of … (Indian) soldiers will be in strict conformity with the practice of their religions”.
The report states: “In conflict with the organisation’s founding principles, it is estimated that between 45,000 and 54,000 casualties (predominantly Indian, East African, West African, Egyptian and Somali personnel) were commemorated unequally.
“For some, rather than marking their graves individually, as the IWGC would have done in Europe, these men were commemorated collectively on memorials. For others who were missing, their names were recorded in registers rather than in stone.”