Abstract
The centenary of the First World War occasioned an outpouring of books on the ‘ur-catastrophe’ of the twentieth century, ranging from synthetic accounts for the general reader to edited volumes of cutting-edge academic research. Books on India in the war could, however, be counted on the fingers of one hand. This was hardly surprising. War and the military have long been consigned to the margins of the historiography of modern India. Radhika Singha writes that she ‘missed the tide which took many manuscripts past finishing line’ during the centenary (p. 2). This may well have been fortunate. For the receding tide has left many a whale beached. More importantly, it enables us better to appreciate her outstanding book.
The Coolie’s Great War is an important contribution to the growing body of work on non-European non-combatants during the war. But its real significance can only be understood against the backcloth of the existing—albeit meagre—historiography of India in the First World War. Both wartime propaganda and subsequent historical accounts focus all but exclusively on Indian soldiers on the Western Front in 1914–15. As Curzon put it in 1919, ‘the Indian Expeditionary Force arrived in the nick of time…it helped to save the cause both of the Allies and of civilization.’ He also wrote that the
letters of the Indian soldiers to their folk at home would stand comparison with any that the official post-bag has conveyed to England from our own heroes at the front, in their uncomplaining loyalty, their high enthusiasm, their philosophic endurance, and their tolerant acceptance of privations and sufferings of war.
Notwithstanding this characteristic overstatement, a cache of these letters survived in the military censor’s records and has shaped much of the historiography over the past three decades. David Omissi published a selection of these as Indian Voices in the Great War. This fit well with the historiographic trend of writing social histories of the Indian army, focusing on the figure of the Sepoy. The Sepoy in these accounts was typically a ‘peasant in uniform’, drawn mostly from the ‘martial races’ of North and North-West India—a subaltern in more than one sense. The genetic imprint of this move is evident in the best of the recent crop of books: Santanu Das’ India, Empire, and First World War Culture.
Singha takes us in an altogether new direction. For a start, she breaks with the existing historiography’s fixation on the combatant soldier. The Indian army always had a significant component of non-combatants and she shows that they played an immensely consequential role during the First World War. For another, these non-combatants often came from social groups other than the ‘martial races’, though the boundaries tended to get blurred as the war progressed. Thus, Singha considers the experiences of soldiers from Dalit communities, the tribes of central and Northeast India, and the groups branded in official discourse as ‘criminal tribes’. For a third, she incisively combines military history with the broader histories of labour and penal regimes. Finally, she frames all this appositely in the context of India’s centrality to the British empire. As a sub-imperial system, India’s sphere of influence and interference stretched from Hong Kong and Singapore to Malaya and Burma, Tibet and Xinjiang, Afghanistan and Southern Iran, Iraq and the Persian Gulf states, Aden and East Africa. India not only provided troops to secure these parts, but also police and labour, capital and laws. The upshot is an entirely novel and original perspective both on the Indian army and on the Great War.
Some 460,000 Indian non-combatants were deployed during the war. The Mesopotamian theatre (Iraq) accounted for nearly three-fourths of these—a figure that also reminds us of the centrality of this theatre to the Indian war effort. France, Egypt and the Persian Gulf came next; followed by East Africa, Gallipoli and Salonika, Aden. In considering non-combatants, Singha observes, we also leave behind a Punjab-centric account of the war: the United Provinces supplied the largest number of non-combatants and stood second in the number of combatants. Besides, there were significant numbers recruited from Central, Southern and Northeast India.
The most arresting parts of the book analyze the social composition of the non-combatants and the recruiting techniques employed by the Raj. Singha deftly unpacks the discourse of the ‘martial caste’ Sepoy drawn from the ‘yeomanry’ and the non-combatant ‘village menial’ or kamin—a distinction that carried over into the service conditions of these groups. Even as Dalits were recruited in increasing numbers, the expanding Indian army was depicted as ‘an idyllic extension of rural society, with the Raj as the benevolent jajman, or patron, receiving from each according to social standing and rewarding each accordingly’ (p. 16). Like most pastorals this did not much accord with reality. Singha shows how the military authorities sought to reshape these allegedly ‘low caste’, unruly and unsanitary followers into efficient ‘auxiliary services’—by the use of summary court martials, capital punishment and a liberal application of the lash (p. 56).
The exigencies of the war, however, required the Raj to dig ever deeper into Indian society. Officials grappled with the problem of the legal form in which Indians could be sent overseas for military labour, not least because the system of indentured contracts had already drawn the ire of the nationalists. To keep recruitment ‘voluntary’ the Raj resorted to several expedients. Prisons provided a convenient ground for recruitment—one that had the added advantage of avoiding charges of press-ganging. That archetypal construct of colonial knowledge, the ‘criminal tribes’, also came in handy. The district magistrates of the United Provinces, Bihar and Orissa were urged to recruit sweepers ‘from among the criminal tribes of Doms…who, although not in jail at the moment, are always more or less on the verge of it’ (p. 105). Similarly, the notion that ‘aboriginal’ communities provided ‘a particularly valuable kind of coolie’ led to a recruitment drive among the tribes of Central and Eastern India (p. 126). The insatiable demand for military labourers continued into the post-war period. As late as April 1920, Singha notes, 80% of the railway personnel in Iraq were Indians.
Frontier tribes were another systematic target for recruiting non-combatants. Singha argues that ‘Sub-imperial ambitions along India’s long land frontier left their imprint upon manpower recruitment for World War One’ (p. 160). The Raj drilled more intensively into the labour regimes that had been developed in the course of frontier-making over the preceding decades. Singha turns the spotlight on a range of figures that enabled the recruitment of these ‘primitive’ peoples: local chieftains and missionaries, administrators and official ethnographers, as well as an emerging tribal literati. Then again, there were instances of fierce resistance by the tribes: most notably, by the Santhals in the princely state of Mayurbhanj in June 1917. This, as well as the Kuki Chin uprising in the northeast, were put down brutally by the Raj. The latter, we may add, showcased a new repertoire of colonial counterinsurgency, including systematic destruction of supplies and herding ‘sympathetic’ tribes into specific villages—the precursor of the ‘strategic hamlets’ programme in Malaya and Vietnam during the wars of decolonization.
The Coolie’s Great War is extensively researched in some twenty archives, numerous private paper collections, newspapers and periodicals as well as published primary sources. Indeed, the book is a remarkable feat of research. Singha has visited archives of whose existence I never knew, such as the Haryana Academy of History and Culture which apparently has a collection of folks songs pertaining to the war. She frequently remarks how little the sources tell us about the experience of these workers. And yet the book shows how much can be done by deep archival work as well as a careful reading and contextualization of even fragmentary sources. The book also carries an attractive set of contemporary photographs and images. Radhika Singha has opened new horizons of inquiry and arguments about the Indian army and the First World War. I hope future scholars will follow her intrepid charge into these trenches of historiography.