Santanu Das (Queen Mary, University of London)
Britain, India and the First World War: Perception, proximity and prejudice
India contributed one and a half million men, including 900,000 combatants and 600,000 non-combatants to the First World War, who served in places as varied as France, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, East Africa, Egypt and the Far East. Of all the colonies in the British, French and German empire, the contribution of India in terms of man-power remains the most substantial; some 49,000 sepoys were killed. Fighting for the empire at a time of nationalist uprisings, these soldiers have been doubly marginalized: in the nationalist-elitist historiography in India and in the modern memory of war which has remained largely Eurocentric, if not British (within Great Britain). But how were these Indian sepoys remembered and represented in the British imagination of the time, what fantasies and anxieties did they produce, and how did their service interlock with the discourses round empire, race and war?
In 1914-1918, the Indian participation in the First World War created a tumult in the cultural and literary consciousness in Great Britain: the Indian sepoys were obsessively photographed and written about in newspapers, a couple of short films documenting the Indian participation were produced, the Brighton Pavilion was transformed into a hospital for the Indian wounded who were visited by the King. Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves all mention the Indian sepoys. Literary writings in Britain about the sepoys range from Rudyard Kipling’s The Eyes of Asia (1915) to General Willcock’s With the Indians in France (1919) to Talbot Mundy’s novel, Hira Singh: When India Came to Fight (1918).
Starting with archival research in both Britain and India – including photographs, newspaper accounts, paintings and memoirs from the Imperial War Museum, London as well as from National Archives, India, as well as some original sound-recordings of the sepoys’ songs and speeches – I shall explore the impact that these sepoys had on British cultural and literary consciousness of the time. The arrival of these thousands of sepoys in England, as well as their interaction with the ‘Tommies’ in the trenches of France and Flanders, provide a tumultuous moment of colonial encounter: how do they affect the various contemporary discourses surrounding British perceptions of India, particularly around issues of empire, ‘martial race theory’, the non-white body, masculinity and fears of miscegenation?
This will be an interdisciplinary paper, recovering and analysing a key moment in the British perception of India and Indians, through a dialogue between historical, visual and literary material.
In 1914-1918, the Indian participation in the First World War created a tumult in the cultural and literary consciousness in Great Britain: the Indian sepoys were obsessively photographed and written about in newspapers, a couple of short films documenting the Indian participation were produced, the Brighton Pavilion was transformed into a hospital for the Indian wounded who were visited by the King. Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves all mention the Indian sepoys. Literary writings in Britain about the sepoys range from Rudyard Kipling’s The Eyes of Asia (1915) to General Willcock’s With the Indians in France (1919) to Talbot Mundy’s novel, Hira Singh: When India Came to Fight (1918).
Starting with archival research in both Britain and India – including photographs, newspaper accounts, paintings and memoirs from the Imperial War Museum, London as well as from National Archives, India, as well as some original sound-recordings of the sepoys’ songs and speeches – I shall explore the impact that these sepoys had on British cultural and literary consciousness of the time. The arrival of these thousands of sepoys in England, as well as their interaction with the ‘Tommies’ in the trenches of France and Flanders, provide a tumultuous moment of colonial encounter: how do they affect the various contemporary discourses surrounding British perceptions of India, particularly around issues of empire, ‘martial race theory’, the non-white body, masculinity and fears of miscegenation?
This will be an interdisciplinary paper, recovering and analysing a key moment in the British perception of India and Indians, through a dialogue between historical, visual and literary material.
