The Indian Empire at War and India, Empire and the First World War review – a story finally told
The experience of the 1.5 million men who fought in the Indian army during the first world war is at last being recounted, in books by George Morton-Jack and Santanu Das
“At Amritsar they shot who the British told them to.” That short statement in George Morton-Jack’s account of the Indian army in the first world war is blunt and true – and a reminder that the truth can be an inconvenience to the nationalist historian. In a notorious massacre that marked the beginning of the end of British rule in India, hundreds of people died when in April 1919 troops fired into a crowd of demonstrators at the Jallianwala Bagh, a public garden in Amritsar. We know the man who gave the order to fire. Col Reginald Dyer was acclaimed as the empire’s saviour by militant imperialists in Britain, and condemned by others as a bloodthirsty fool. We know about the dead, who had gathered to demand the release of two popular nationalist leaders. But who were the other actors, the men who pulled the triggers when Dyer blew his whistle?
They wore the uniform of the 54th Sikhs, the 59th Scinde Rifles and the 9th Gurkhas and they had been recruited in British India, Nepal and the autonomous borderlands of Afghanistan. Within 10 minutes, these young Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims had fired 1,650 rounds into a peaceful assembly of 20,000 Punjabis of the same faiths. Soon after, a British civil servant recorded the only known comment from the shooters. “Sahib,” said a Gurkha, “while it lasted it was splendid, we fired every round we had.”
Among politicised Indians, the repercussions were profound. The Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood. MK Gandhi, who had been a prominent army recruiter throughout the first world war, now turned against troops whose services “have been more often used for enslaving us than for protecting us”. As Santanu Das writes, the events were “a huge watershed” that “would irredeemably change the very meaning of war service in the national psyche, and gradually airbrush it out of the nation’s history”.
But in the meantime the behaviour of the Indian army was hardly affected. It continued to follow the orders of its British commanders. A month after Amritsar, 340,000 of its overwhelmingly Indian troops massed on India’s western border to fight – and quickly win – the third Anglo-Afghan war. And from 1921 to 1922, its artillery and armoured cars put down an insurrection in south India known as the Moplah rebellion, killing 2,400 Muslim villagers who were armed with little more than swords.
Why did Indians kill and suppress other Indians on behalf of their foreign rulers? Why did they fight, often bravely, for the British empire in distant theatres of the first world war such as Flanders, Gallipoli and Tanganyika? What did they think of their experience and how did it mark them? These questions lie at the heart of these two rewarding accounts of one of the empire’s most remarkable institutions: in Morton-Jack’s words, the Indian army of 1914-18 was “uniquely multicultural, combining such a variety of humankind into a single brotherhood-in-arms that it was really a modern wonder of the world … a breathtaking array worshipping more gods and speaking more languages than any other army on the planet”. Its ranks contained Christians, Jews, Buddhists, animists and Zoroastrians as well as Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, speaking many different Indian languages and dialects and sometimes barely understanding the army’s official vernacular, Hindustani, the blend of Hindi and Urdu that British officers used to command their servants.
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During the course of the war, a total of about 1.5 million Indian soldiers and non-combatants served in the Indian army; nearly 1.1 million of them were sent overseas; between 50,000 and 70,000 died. Money was of course the obvious attraction. The pay was good by the standards of rural India and there was the prospect of a pension and sometimes even a plot of land on retirement (the last was especially true in Punjab, which provided nearly half the recruits sent abroad). But money alone can’t explain what Das calls India’s “phenomenal war enthusiasm”, at least in the conflict’s early years, before the supply of volunteers began to dry up and administrations had to apply more coercive methods. Another and more perverse recruiter was racism. The non-white people of the empire were keen to prove that they could provide just as able, loyal and courageous an army as any raised in the British counties. A wartime poem in Bengali ran: “Who calls me now a coward base, / And brands my race a coward race? / I’ll brook no more such scoffing word: / My king himself has washed the shame / That fouled so long my stainless name.”
But loyalty and courage did not bring equality. As an early Indian officer in the army noticed, “the Indians are looked upon as inferiors in the scale of humanity”. To preserve their command and control, Morton-Jack writes, the British “relentlessly projected an aura of ascendancy they called their ‘prestige’” – which, as a white British private explained, meant that they needed “to keep the bleeding natives down … the more you are down on them the better they will respect you”. More than that, the British were so terrified of damage to their prestige, this magic ingredient of their success, that they prevented the Indian army from fighting white armies – not because the Indian army might lose but because it might win, and in that way undermine the racial hierarchy.
Indian regiments were organised along lines of tribal, caste and local loyalty, so that, in the words of a secretary of state for India, Charles Wood, “Sikh might fire into Hindu, Gurkha into either, without any scruple in case of need”. In other words, so that in case of an emergency such as mutiny, they would be prepared to kill one another. The outbreak of war put paid to the ban on fighting whites, despite the opposition of Lord Roberts, an old India hand who as young soldier had fought against Indians in the rebellion of 1857 and knew their ferocity. The policy was overturned in a secret meeting of the British government’s war council in August 1914, and before the end of the month an Indian expeditionary force was sailing for France to shore up the British army in its retreat from Mons. The decision to allow brown-skinned troops to fight white ones turned “the first page in a new history of civilisation”, according to the Times, while Lord Curzon, a former viceroy, looked forward to the sight of “the dark-skinned Gurkha making himself at ease in the gardens of Potsdam”.
Nothing like that happened. The Indian infantry was withdrawn from Flanders in 1915, and the idea soon began to grow, to be embedded in subsequent histories, that Indian troops were simply unfitted for this new kind of war: too easily terrified by shellfire, too cold in an unfamiliar climate, too pre-industrial in their culture to cope with mechanised warfare. Some statistics point in that direction. The Indians arrived at the front in October and by 3 November the number of them suffering hand wounds, often if not usually self-inflicted, reached 1,049. Others, after trying hopelessly to shelter in shallow trenches from ferocious German bombardment anand with their officers dead, simply ran away.
Morton-Jack makes two points in their defence: that they were not alone in these reactions – panic under shellfire and self-inflicted wounds were common on all sides – and most of the Indian units, by sticking together and digging in, had saved the overstretched British Expeditionary Force’s line from collapsing at the first battle of Ypres, which in turn saved the entire allied cause. “The Indians naturally do not like shell fire,” wrote their commander, James Willcocks. “Who does?”
Both books reveal the touching humanity of the Indian soldier in his encounter with the European war. A Sikh cavalryman sees a French peasant receive news of his son’s death and marvels at his stoicism when the farmhand, after a minute or two, resumes ploughing his field: “There is no wild lamentation as with us in the Punjab.” A trench diary kept by a young Pathan infantryman contains a list of Urdu words and their English equivalents, including turnip, carrot, parsnip, potatoes, prick, penus (sic), testacles (sic), harsole (sic), brests (sic), fuck and flour. The information is often memorable. Who knew that Germany’s first mosque was constructed for Muslim deserters from the Indian army and its French allies; or could have guessed that the disastrous, disease-ridden campaigns in Mesopotamia and East Africa had Indian soldiers pining for their time in the trenches of Flanders?
The authors have different ambitions. Morton-Jack recounts a comprehensive and lively history of the Indian army in all its tragedies, difficulties and occasional triumphs. Das, an English literature scholar, shows how the war affected Indian soldiers and the society they came from by providing, to quote the author’s intention, “a book about memory and feeling”. Both have to contend, however, with a scarcity of written material other than official papers in government archives – no surprise given that the prewar literacy rate in Punjab was 6.4% for men and 0.3% among women. Both, therefore, often use the same evidence, including the desperate letter that Havildar Abdul Rahman in France sent home to Baluchistan in May 1915: “For God’s sake, don’t come, don’t come, don’t come to this war in Europe … tell my brother Muhammud Yakub Khan for God’s sake not to enlist.”
After Indian independence, the story of the imperial army suffered from decades of Indian awkwardness and British neglect. The men who served in it, Das writes, were “doomed to wander in the no man’s land between the Eurocentric narratives of the ‘Great War and Modern Memory’ and nationalist histories of India”. Gradually, they are being found again and brought home.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...anu-das-review
