Indian Voices Of The Great War

Indian soldiers served in France from 1914 to 1918. This book is a selection of their letters. By turns poignant, funny, and almost unbearably moving, these documents vividly evoke the world of the Western Front - as seen through 'subaltern' Indian eyes. The letters also bear eloquent witness to the sepoys' often unsettling encounter with Europe, and with European culture. This book helps to map the imaginative landscape of South Asia's warrior-peasant communities.

"The first comprehensive history of the Aboriginal First World War experience on the battlefield and the home front. When the call to arms was heard at the outbreak of the First World War, Canada's First Nations pledged their men and money to the Crown to honour their long-standing tradition of forming military alliances with Europeans during times of war, and as a means of resisting cultural assimilation and attaining equality through shared service and sacrifice. Initially, the Canadian government rejected these offers based on the belief that status Indians were unsuited to modern, civilized warfare. But in 1915, Britain intervened and demanded Canada actively recruit Indian soldiers to meet the incessant need for manpower. Thus began the complicated relationships between the Imperial Colonial and War Offices, the Department of Indian Affairs, and the Ministry of Militia that would affect every aspect of the war experience for Canada's Aboriginal soldiers. In his groundbreaking new book, For King and Kanata, Timothy C. Winegard reveals how national and international forces directly influenced the more than 4,000 status Indians who voluntarily served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force between 1914 and 1919--a per capita percentage equal to that of Euro-Canadians--and how subsequent administrative policies profoundly affected their experiences at home, on the battlefield, and as returning veterans."--Publisher's website.

Drawing on untapped new sources, the first global history of the Indian Expeditionary Forces in World War I While their story is almost always overlooked, the 1.5 million Indian soldiers who served the British Empire in World War I played a crucial role in the eventual Allied victory. Despite their sacrifices, Indian troops received mixed reactions from their allies and their enemies alike-some were treated as liberating heroes, some as mercenaries and conquerors themselves, and all as racial inferiors and a threat to white supremacy. Yet even as they fought as imperial troops under the British flag, their broadened horizons fired in them new hopes of racial equality and freedom on the path to Indian independence. Drawing on freshly uncovered interviews with members of the Indian Army in Iraq and elsewhere, historian George Morton-Jack paints a deeply human story of courage, colonization, and racism, and finally gives these men their rightful place in history.

Over a million Indian soldiers fought in the First World War, the largest force from the colonies and dominions. Their contribution, however, has been largely forgotten. Many soldiers were illiterate and travelled from remote villages in India to fight in the muddy trenches in France and Flanders. Many went on to win the highest bravery awards. For King and another Country tells, for the first time, the personal stories of some of these Indians who went to the Western Front: from a grand turbanned Maharaja rearing to fight for Empire to a lowly sweeper who dies in a hospital in England, from a Pathan who wins the Victoria Cross to a young pilot barely out of school. Shrabani Basu delves into archives in Britain and narratives buried in villages in India and Pakistan to recreate the War through the eyes of the Indians who fought it. There are heroic tales of bravery as well as those of despair and desperation; there are accounts of the relationships that were forged between the Indians with their British officers and how curries reached the frontline. Above all, it is the great story of how the War changed India and led, ultimately, to the call for independence.

This is the first cultural and literary history of India and the First World War, with archival research from Europe and South Asia.

The centenary of the First World War in 2014-18 offers an opportunity to reflect upon the role of gender history in shaping our understanding of this pivotal international event. From the moment of its outbreak, the gendered experiences of the war have been seen by contemporary observers and postwar commentators and scholars as being especially significant for shaping how the war can and must be understood. The negotiating of ideas about gender by women and men across vast reaches of the globe characterizes this modern, instrumental conflict. Over the past twenty-five years, as the scholarship on gender and this war has grown, there has never been a forum such as the one presented here that placed so many of the varying threads of this complex historiography into conversation with one another in a manner that is at once accessible and provocative. Given the vast literature on the war itself, scholarship on gender and various themes and topics provides students as well as scholars with a chance to think not only about the subject of the war but also the methodological implications of how historians have approached it. While many studies have addressed the national or transnational narrative of women in the war, none address both femininity and masculinity, and the experiences of both women and men across the same geographic scope as the studies presented in this volume.

This book seeks to tell the story of the Great War through the eyes of the Sikh soldier and Sikh people themselves, by examining their war time experiences from France, from the hospital, from the trench, from the village and an array of lands.