Book Review: 'India, Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images and Songs' by Santanu Das

Book: INDIA, EMPIRE AND FIRST WORLD WAR CULTURE: Writings, Images and Songs
Author: Santanu Das
Publisher: Cambridge, University Press,
Pages: 484
Price: Rs 1,987

The past four years, marking the centenary of the World War I (WWI), have seen the publication of several books that have shone the light on India’s connection with the four-year-long conflict, a subject that had not hitherto got its due, owing to the Eurocentric bias of Western scholarship. A majority of these have focused on the Indian sepoy, an estimated 10,96,013 of whom served in France, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Persian Gulf, and East Africa – to name the most prominent fronts in which the Indian forces fought. Of these, between 50,000 and 70,000 men died by the time the war ended in 1918.

Who were these men? What motivated them to enlist in the British army, and fight for a cause they but poorly understood? What were their thoughts about the alien land and people they encountered there? And what of their families back home – what did they think? These are some of the questions tackled by the recent spate of WWI books.

Santanu Das’ book is in a similar vein, except that its ambit is wider, deeper and more nuanced. Das, who teaches English at King’s College, London, does not limit himself to the military, social, and political, but engages minutely with the cultural and artistic works produced at the time.

(Convalescent sepoys at Brighton enjoying the sunny hours in the spacious grounds of the Pavilion-Pic: Wikimedia Commons)

Thus, Das has not just combed through government gazettes, newspapers reports in English and vernacular languages, speeches by leaders, pamphlets and letters – the habitual hunting ground of historians – but also looked at folk songs, photographs, paintings, poems, novels, even gossip and rumours. “Rumours are deeply revealing of local anxieties, excitabilities, susceptibilities and pressure points,” Das writes.

Indeed, Das writes, historians cannot just rely on the textual – letters, diaries, journals, memoirs – when looking at non-literate colonial soldiers. Especially at a time of strict censorship, anger and resistance against the government tend to find a coded expression in popular culture. Das gives an example of a short, seemingly comic verse in Urdu from a collection called Bahār-i-Jarman (The Spring of the Germans) (1915), where two merchants playing Holi, becomes a metaphor to depict the war as a “blood sport”.

Similarly, Das argues in a section called Five Shades of Brown, that photographs of Indian sepoys – and they were photographed everywhere they went – fundamentally changed the way the West perceived and represented the colonial ‘other’. While ideas of race and ethnography continued to subsist, the reality of ‘brown bodies’ in their backyard was, perhaps, the first step towards building ‘cosmopolitan sympathies’. Conversely, for the sepoys, such close encounters reinforced their ‘brownness’. Das turns to Mulk Raj Anand’s novel, Across the Black Waters, to show – reinforcing their feelings of fear and inhibition and ironically, also excitement to be in the company of white men.

While this is an academic book, not popular history, Das writes lucidly enough for his book to be accessible to the interested, general reader.