In this centenary year of the Great War, unheard voices of the combatants and non-combatants who took part in it are being dredged up to create a more nuanced picture of this enterprise that altered the course of history, snatching away 40 million lives in one fell swoop.
The Indians who fought in it for the British are especially in the spotlight, because, although they added up to some 1.28 million, very little is known about them. There was no Wilfred Owen among the mostly illiterate ranks of the Indian soldiers to document the horror of the war. This, added to our predilection as a nation to forget the past (or to selectively remember only those bits of it that can be made to serve a present-day purpose), have created a vacuum, which books such as the two under review seek to fill out.
Unjust battle
George Morton-Jack’s book begins with a boast: “This book is the first single narrative of it [the Indian Army under the British] on all fronts, a global epic not only of the Indians’ part in the Allied victory over the Central Powers, but also of soldiers’ personal discoveries on their four-year odyssey.”
The ‘first single narrative’ part is debatable — the other book under review, Santanu Das’s, came out at around the same time when Morton-Jack’s was published. And then notice the grand words Morton-Jack uses — ‘global epic’, ‘personal discoveries’, ‘odyssey’ — which seem to suggest that World War I was a godsend to the Indians, giving them the chance of a lifetime to become epic heroes when, under usual circumstances, they would have rotted away in their villages, squabbling over ‘honour’, money and property.
The rest of the book subtly upholds this view although, to be fair to Morton-Jack, he does touch upon the glaring injustice of a colonised people fighting and dying for a cause not remotely their own. But the overwhelming impression one gets from this book is that of the author as a later-day Raj apologist who is quite determined in his belief that the war did more good than harm to the sepoys — by opening up their minds as they came in contact with diverse cultures and amply compensating them financially for their efforts, to boot. He says in the Epilogue that the casualty among Indian soldiers was low, with just about 34,000 killed — ‘some 2.25 per cent of the Indian Army’s total of servicemen’ — and Indian villages of the time, with their prevalent pestilential conditions, had a greater potential to kill than trench warfare. The last bit of information seems to have come straight out of some enlistment pamphlet handed out by warmongers.
Many voices
To read Das’s account after Morton-Jack’s is to get a fair idea of what all the latter has excluded to arrive at his pet thesis. Das leaves nothing out: his book jangles with voices — of sepoys, poets, painters, women left behind, Indian nationalists, journalists, British officials — to create a fulsome picture of the Great War. He combs archives to present ‘raw histories’ — material, visual, oral — so that the dead and the forgotten start speaking again, in their own voice.
All the positive fall-outs of the war underlined by Morton-Jack are present here too, but there are counterpoints in profusion. To cite one example, Morton-Jack spends pages on the excellent medical attention given to the wounded Indian soldiers to bring out, chiefly, how the British stuck to their ethos of ‘kindly care’. The Brighton Pavilion, a royal residence made in the Indo-Saracenic style typical of 19th century India, was converted into a hospital to make the injured sepoys feel at home.
A grand gesture, no doubt, notwithstanding the rigid racial boundaries erected to ensure that relations between the British care-givers and their charges remained strictly formal — a fact mentioned by both Morton-Jack and Das. The two books even have a photograph in common — of a recuperating soldier on a wheelchair dictating a letter home to another seated on a bench in Brighton Pavilion in the summer of 1915.
But one has to read Das to look properly, and by looking, to understand. The soldier in the wheelchair has placed his hand on the shoulder of the letter-writer in what seems like a gesture of deep gratitude, of wordless communication. Here is the vital human touch that the British, for all their protestations of sympathy, would not allow between themselves and the soldiers fighting their war. One learns to see the vaunted medical care as just another means of war propaganda after reading Das.
Retelling history
Yet Das’s stance is anything but an easy, anti-imperialistic one: in some of the most interesting pages of the book, he presents a trenchant critique of Gandhi, who had zealously participated in the recruitment campaign while continuing to preach the doctrine of non-violence.
The diverse voices he brings together here — from the villages of Punjab, from Calcutta, from the warfront, from the labour camps — would not allow for a singular, unipolar narrative to take shape. What we have instead are what Raymond Williams (quoted by Das) has called ‘structures of feeling’, that create a whole new affective history of World War I.
The Indian Empire at War: From Jihad to Victory, The Untold Story of the Indian Army in the First World War ; George Morton-Jack, Little, Brown, ₹699.
India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs ; Santanu Das, Cambridge University Press, ₹2,145.
