Wednesday 15 November, 2000
Like Another Mahabharata: Indian Soldiers in the Great War
When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914, it immediately turned to its colonial army in India to supply urgently needed manpower on the Western Front. Fifty thousand soldiers from the Indian subcontinent thus found themselves on the battlefields of Europe engaged in a bloody war whose scale and horrors reminded them of their ancient Hindu epic, the Mahabharata.
The Indians' description of their experiences on and off the battlefields filled the thousands of letters they wrote home, many of which were translated by censors and have survived to this day. In Omnibus, Indian-born writer Mukti Jain Campion pays tribute to the men who crossed the oceans to fight for Britain and rediscovers the Indian soldiers' own voices through their correspondence.
More Indians volunteered to fight for Britain in World War I than all the Scots, Welsh and Irish combined and more than the sum total from all the rest of Britain's colonies and dominions. If that comes as a surprise to you, you're not alone. The contribution of the 1.27 million Indian volunteers has been almost completely neglected by British and Indian historians and they have remained no more than ghosts on the landscape of history.
Indian contributions
Lord Salisbury once described India as:
'a barracks in the Oriental seas from which we may draw any number of troops without paying for them.'
The colonial Indian army was already trained and the soldiers' salaries (including those of their white officers) were paid for by India. Thus when war was declared it was the Indians who found themselves among the first soldiers of the British Empire to be deployed on the Western Front.
Despite being experienced, professional soldiers they were not properly equipped for the cold weather of Europe nor for the new types of warfare. They suffered huge casualties and their familiar British officers were largely wiped out in the first few weeks of fighting, leaving them under the command of men who did not speak their language. Yet the Chief Military Censor who was charged with monitoring their morale, was moved to comment that 'not since the days of Hannibal has any body of mercenaries suffered so much and complained so little'.
Indian troops served not only in Europe but also in all the other major theatres of war, most notably the Middle East. There are many other neglected facts about the contribution of Indians to World War I. Through taxation, India raised two major war loans for Britain, amounting to millions of pounds each and which were not to be paid back.
As well as money and men, India provided many of the vital supplies for the war: jute for sandbags, vast quantities of wheat and rice to feed not only the army but also ordinary British people. These facts certainly challenge the popular stereotype of India as being the recipient of European charity.
'Not since the days of Hannibal has any body of mercenaries suffered so much and complained so little'
- Chief Military Censor | |
Letters of honour
So, who is going to set the record straight? One of the most surprising answers to this comes from the Indian soldiers themselves. Letters to their families written whilst on the Western Front were translated by military censors and have survived in their thousands, giving us a chance to get a direct insight into their experiences.
Historian David Omissi of the University of Hull has published an edited collection of the letters (Indian Voices of the Great War, Macmillan 1999), creating a new opportunity for bringing the Indian soldiers into the mainstream of public awareness. The soldiers' letters shed new light on the perplexing question of why so many Indian men were prepared to risk their lives fighting someone else's war.
The pay, paltry as it was, represented a useful income to the rural communities from which they were drawn. However, the letters show that the Indian men were not simply mercenaries - they had a strong sense of loyalty, duty and professionalism as soldiers. They were primarily recruited from what the British believed were the martial races such as Sikhs, Rajputs and Gurkhas. All had a long tradition of fighting and saw it as a noble profession that could bring honour to their families and villages. Some even believed that fighting in Europe would be their opportunity to prove themselves the equal of Europeans and therefore demonstrate the Indians' fitness for self-government.
But the letters certainly do not reveal a great deal of emotional attachment to the Nationalist movement -which perhaps explains why Indians feel ambivalent about the Indian soldiers. Unlike the Australians who have made films such as Gallipoli and ensured that their contribution to World War I is part of their national mythology, India has appeared uncertain about how to treat its own men's involvement. Apart from a single novel (Across the Black Waters by Mulk Raj Anand) there has been little attempt to tell the stories of those men.
Rewriting history
But there are Indians and Pakistanis living in Britain today who are beginning to take ownership of this history and who see a need to make it more widely available. Baroness Shreela Flather, the first Asian woman to be made a peer and whose own father served in Mesopotamia, is behind a campaign to erect new memorial gates on London’s Hyde Park Corner in honour of the Commonwealth soldiers who fought in both world wars.
Dominic Rai, director of the Man Mela Theatre Company has been using the soldiers' letters to bring their experiences to a wider audience. The eloquence and powerful imagery used in the letters give them a literary quality that is rare in the letters of European working class soldiers.
Rewriting history is always a sensitive business. There is a danger that in drawing attention to one neglected group we appear to overshadow another. But it is not simply a matter of paying tribute and honouring the Indian soldiers. There are other important reasons for restoring their place in history.
In today's multicultural Britain we need to look back at the shared history of its people and look at the ways in which our ancestors worked together in the past. For example, approximately a fifth of all the eligible men of the Punjab volunteered, so there is barely a Punjabi family that was not touched by the consequences of this mass exodus of men.
Talk to any Punjabi immigrant in Europe today and it is highly likely that they will describe grandfathers and other relatives who fought for Britain. Recovering this lost history and revealing the vital contribution that India made is important to British Asians' sense of belonging and identity in Europe. It's a process that is only just beginning.
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| The Indian Veterans of World War II |
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During World War II much of north-east India was turned into a British military camp to defend south-east Asia from the advancing Japanese. Voluntary enlistment in the Indian Army – under British command – was stepped up. By the end of the war it became the largest volunteer army in the world – and played a decisive role in ending the war.
In 1944, Indian forces were largely responsible for recapturing Burma and stopping the Japanese advance on the rest of the Raj.
At the British war cemetery at Kohima, near the Burmese border in north-east India, their contribution is remembered with the words:
‘For your tomorrow, we’ve given our today.’ |
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