A 100 years ago, on a warm summer day, Jasbahadur Rai from Darjeeling probably poked through his meagre rations, praying that the war would end. It would have been nearly two years since the 22-year-old rifleman with the 8th Gurkha Rifles had left familiar soil and dug into the trenches of a foreign land, Germany, fighting a foreign battle for foreign kings.
Death surrounded him at the camp where thousands like him were interred. As he looked at the incongruous mosque in front of him, he perhaps wondered if death would visit him in Germany. As he grew leaner, he fondly remembered home. But, there was no one to hear him cry. He remained quiet, embarrassed to speak in a foreign country.
On June 6, 1916, however, his thoughts found resonance, and in some sense, immortality. Rai was called to the barracks where German scientists had set up a phonograph, invented barely four decades earlier. They asked him to speak in his native Nepali. ‘PK 308’ was born, first as a wax disc, from which shellac disks were moulded. Far beyond his death, these disks have survived to tell Rai’s tale. Here, for 144 seconds he sings a self-composed poem of agony, longing and anguish: “My body is small, if I cry, how much do I cry? My body has become like a rope. If I cry, how much do I cry?”
He remembers the mustard and oranges in his village, and sings plaintively: “When I think of home my body weighs 33 grams… I tell god that my life journey is very long. That is why I want to go to my village.” Two years in the prisoner of war camp had broken him. “On returning to my village, I would like to cut grass in the fields. I want to leave this country.”
A few months later, on a cold January day, his journey ended, perhaps from tuberculosis or one of the other diseases that ran rampant in the camp. His pristine white tombstone — commemorating a brave Hindu soldier, service number 4194 — lies among 206 others in the Indian soldiers’ cemetery in Zehrendorf, on the outskirts of Berlin.
Much like Rai, at the peak of World War I, over 15,000 soldiers from the colonies of Britain and France and Russia, were kept as prisoners in Halfmoon camp (named after the crescent of the mosque) at Wünsdorf and at the neighbouring Weinberglager camp at Zossen, both close to the capital of imperial Germany.
The extraordinary diversity of the camps saw a unique experiment that allows us today a peek into their lives. Linguists, musicologists, and anthropologists from Berlin, attracted by the veritable supermarket of ethnicities, landed at the camps and recorded over 1,650 shellac disks of voices from Africa, Asia and Europe. Having survived two world wars and decades of inclement weather, these ghostly recordings are preserved in the unique sound archives at Humboldt University, which seems to be the reluctant custodian of an imperial legacy. In at least 250 records, languages such as Bengali, Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, Pali, Garhwali, Telugu, Tamil and the hill languages of Magar and Gurung, come alive through stories of kings, fables of animals, alphabets and numbers, excerpts from the Guru Granth Sahib, poems, and folk and religious songs.
In a poetic rhythm, Bela Singh narrates his capture after arriving in Europe at Marseille (France), where they ate well after an arduous journey. The major, however, packed them off in cars and towards the trenches. “Go now, oh Lions, into the trenches, go! Fight the Germans, why do you walk backwards?” For two months they stayed in the trenches, and many soldiers ran away as German artillery flew at them. Bela Singh, however, could not. “They (Germans) needed their entire strength against me.”
Hunger and longing for home are recurring themes. For 77 seconds, the staccato voice of 22-year-old Maal Singh, a Sikh soldier, reverberates amidst static. “There once was a man, who ate butter in Hindustan, drank milk everyday, and then started working with the English (the army),” he starts uncertainly as PK 619. “That man was sent for fighting to Germany. That man wants to go back to India. If he goes back, he will get food.” He clears his voice repeatedly. “If this man continues to stay here for two more years, he will die… the Maharaja (perhaps, referring the Kaiser of Germany) should have mercy and let him go.”
Maal Singh appears to have had a happier ending than many others. The Halfmoon Files, a 2007 documentary that has been screened across the world and has revived interest in the recordings, led to the discovery that he returned home, was honoured, and lived out his life in undivided Punjab.
Unlike other POW camps, these two presented a “kinder” image of Germans. “The idea was to incite the soldiers for revolution in colonial Britain and France. There were lectures on Jihad for Muslim soldiers, to ask them to join the Ottoman Empire, whose religious leaders had declared holy war against the Allied Forces. For the Hindus and Sikhs, there were interactions with members of the India Independence Committee based in Europe,” says Britta Lange, a professor of Cultural History at Humboldt University who stumbled upon the dormant archives for her doctoral thesis in 2002.
The project, however, failed to find much success, and was closed in two-and-a-half years. “The Jihad strategy was not successful. Several battalions, consisting mostly of Tatars and North Africans, were sent to the Ottoman Army. There were just 49 South Asians among them,” says Heike Liebau, a scholar and co-author of the book, When the War Began, We Heard of Several Kings (which takes its title from one of the recordings).
With the recordings immortalised now in the digital age, perhaps the Humboldt archive will speak once again to India’s mainstream consciousness, where WWI remains a largely forgotten episode. Perhaps, the prophetic saying by Sib Singh, a Sikh from Amritsar, will finally be realised in the home that he longed for: ‘many stories will be written after the war’.
