The occasion of the centenary of World War I has in India focused attention on the country’s involvement in the conflict, a topic that has long been ignored in popular historical consciousness. Commenting on this recent interest in the subject, the former Supreme Court Judge Marakandey Katju seemed to express a somewhat conventional and a historical view when he stated “it is obvious that the Indian soldiers who fought on the side of the Anglo-French Alliance in France were nothing but mercenaries, fighting not for the interests of the Indian people, but for the Anglo-French Imperialists. Why then should we honour them? They were nothing but hired assassins, hired by the British to kill Germans.”
In post-colonial independent India, there has been little scope for remembering or memorialising an imperial war. But such a view ignores the important role World War I played in shaping not just global politics in its aftermath, but specifically those of colonised countries, including India. The question of honour here is tied in with memory. Forgetting a complicated but important chapter of our history ensures that our understanding of the past is simplistic and erroneous. For one, it is in fact important to remember the reality of the Great War as a great colonial conflict that changed the nature of imperial politics forever. Its involvement in the war and its impact on its historical trajectory itself makes the war an important chapter in India’s history, whether for good or bad.
British India (now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal) made the largest contribution to the war effort in terms of manpower from any of the colonies and dominions of the British Empire. Almost a million and a half Indians played a role in the war. As early as August 1914, Indians — not just as infantry and cavalry, but also as sappers and miners, labourers and followers — were making their way across the once forbidden Kalapani, crossing the seas to take part in the war. Over the four years of the conflict, they were to play an important role in fronts as diverse as France and Flanders, Mesopotamia, East Africa, Egypt and Palestine among others. India’s contribution to the war was not limited to men; it also included raw materials (cotton, jute and leather were particularly important), direct cash contributions and war loans.
It is important to remember that when the war broke out, numerous nationalist leaders in India (including Mahatma Gandhi, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Sarojini Naidu) vocally came out in support of and campaigned for the war effort. Contributing to the war, they believed, would allow Indians to demand greater freedoms from Great Britain.
Initial political payback for this support came in the form of the 1917 Montagu Declaration by the Secretary of State for India, which stated in the plainest terms yet that self-government was not to be a constitutional status reserved for white colonies. However, as the move towards self-government stuttered and the war continued, the economic and political climate in the country deteriorated in a way that was to heavily impact imperial rule. As disgruntlement against the government increased, political turbulence and revolutionary activity (particularly on the part of the revolutionary Ghadar movement) also increased. To curtail anti-government propaganda the British reacted with a battery of repressive measures and eventually enacted the March 1919 ‘Rowlatt’ Act, which aimed to extend the wartime restrictions on civil liberties indefinitely through a system of special courts and detention without trial and was met with near unanimous political opposition.
That the colony, which had so willingly contributed to the war effort, was now being treated with such repression only spurred on the nationalist movement. In many ways this surge in nationalism was a direct consequence of the war, which had challenged seemingly immutable and unchangeable imperial. The Russian Revolution, with its communist ideals of equality and its anti-imperialist stance, as well as the rhetorical impact of the American president Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which explicitly stated that Allied aims included democracy and the right to self-determination, had weakened the notion of empire. Against this global political backdrop and the local repression of the British government Mahatma Gandhi launched his first mass civil disobedience movement. It was also in this context that on April 13 a peaceful, unarmed crowd gathered in Amritsar’s Jallianwalla Bagh and was subsequently shot at under the orders of Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, without any provocation, thus spreading mass unrest across the country.
If the war was an important event for India’s political awakening, its impact on individual veterans was no less important. For many Indian troops, the war was an experience that broadened their horizons and increased their knowledge of the world. For example, the war was the first time Indian soldiers had been sent to fight in Europe. Through their war experiences, Indian troops had been exposed to new geographies, cultures and ideas and this impacted the way they negotiated life in India as well. These reactions were not necessarily uniform or consistent, but they were important. Discontent in Punjab and other heavily-recruited-from areas in the 1920s owed something to the strengthening of new forms of identity, which fed into anti-colonial nationalism. As one Indian veteran noted after the war, “Previously we remained satisfied with the existing circumstances. But when we saw various people and got their views, we started protesting against the inequalities and disparities which the British had created between the white and the black.”
Justice Katju’s statements seem to ignore important aspects of the war such as this. Colonial rule and relationships had to be constantly negotiated and the war was a crucial period in changing the tenor of interaction between the coloniser and the colonised. Dismissing war veterans of the time as mercenaries is too simplistic and problematic a take on this aspect of India’s history, which needs more, not less, engagement.
Vedica Kant is an author whose book If I Die Here, Who Will Remember Me: India and the First World Warwas recently published by Roli Books.
