Rethinking history, war and empire

How does one understand and recover the experience of the past, particularly the texture of human experience, when those people did not leave behind many historical footprints? I think some people were most interested in certain topics, such as, for example, the intimate history of the First World War, entire colonial dimensions of warfare, the involvement of 4 million people of color in the First World War or, more recently, the maritime world, the world of sailors. Now, these men were either non-literate or often couldn't write about their experiences. What do we do about that? 

Exactly what had engaged me was the very question of what is an archive to begin with. Is it a noun or is it a verb, as in, to archive? Is it a will to imperial knowledge, or is it a testimony to silences? On the one hand, we often need to create our archives for subjects for which there are not conventional sources. Equally important are the questions we bring to the archive, because the other thing is: when does an archive become a war archive, or when does an archive become a queer archive? An imperial historian and a postcolonial or a queer critic may look at the same material but raise very different questions and tease out very different intensities of meaning by looking at objects and images.

I had come across the name of Mir Mast because he was famous for deserting the British Army. He was part of the British Army and moved to the German side in 1915. In the archives in Delhi, suddenly I came across his strange notebook, and it was on an envelope that was sealed and confiscated. After almost a hundred years, I was allowed to break the seal, and out came this little trench notebook. Here you have a page from that book. This is one of the biggest reality checks for the post-colonial critic. It is full of rude words, body parts, as you can see: prick, penis, testicles.

I still believe that literature does help to fill in the gaps in the archives, but it also does much more and also slightly differently. For example, when I was looking at the whole role of India in the First World War, we have only fragments, little bits and pieces. We have this wonderful novel, Across the Black Water, written by Mulk Raj Anand much later, but his father was in the British Army, and though he did not fight, Mulk Raj Anand had contact with lots of people who did. It traces the journey of this village boy who goes to France, goes to the trenches, experiences the shock of the encounter with industrial modernity, a first visit to the brothel, then there is a suicide. It brings along the texture of experience which is missing in the archive. At the same time, there are other kinds of literature, and more commonly it comes in sideways and on tip toe and sets up its mirrors at strange angles. I will just give you one example, a little poem. It is one of my favorite poems, by the British poet Edward Thomas, and it is In Memoriam, Easter 1915. I will just read it out. It is about life on the home front: “The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood. This Eastertide call into mind the men, now far from home, who with their sweethearts should have gathered these and will do never again.” Its flowers, Edward Thomas says, these flowers, and it brings to his mind these absent hands, these absent men who are all in France. This is something we would never find in an archive.

A good example is something like E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, started before the war during his first visit or shortly after his first visit to India, and then completed after the First World War and after his second visit. There is a tremendous difference in mood. What is interesting about A Passage to India is that the war does not really figure there; it is about the friendship between Aziz and Fielding. Suddenly, in the middle of it, we have Adela Quested, and then enter the whole Marabar caves. I became so obsessed with the novel that I even made the journey to Marabar Caves. In the caves, you have this strange echo. Is it that, after the First World War, the whole Forsterian cult of liberal humanism could only speak to the garbled version of boom boom like that? Is this meaninglessness and beyond the echo? Can one even hear the distant rattle of the guns of the Western Front, and even beyond it that of the Sepoy Mutiny?

I was on holiday in India, and I happened to visit the Dupleix museum in Chandernagore, which was the former French colony within West Bengal, where I came across this broken pair of glasses.

In the early stages of the war, in September 1914, the Indians were initially supposed to fight in Egypt, but because of the terrible losses on the Western Front, there was a decision made to allow the Indians to fight against other white races for the first time. Even within the hierarchy, there are different gradations of racism. Only Indians were allowed to fight in the Western Front, and it was largely Indians who held the line, at least one third of the line in the winter of 1914. Of course, there were hierarchies and racism; Indians were never allowed to become officers. There was often a lot of very good feeling and care between the British officers and the Indians. I have been working on this for almost 15 years. I have come across lots of examples and accounts, very moving accounts, of Indian sepoys saving the life of their white officers or bringing white officers from the battlefield to the dugout. Very sadly, I have not come across a single example of a white officer ever risking his life to save an Indian sepoy.

When India entered the war in August 1914 through British decision, there was actually widespread enthusiasm from the princes of India from the different political parties. For most of the men in the Indian Army, soldiering was their source of livelihood. Many Indians were recruited. They volunteered; it was for financial need. We should never ever forget that. Once the first batch of Indians reached the trenches and realized the horrors of warfare, they would often write in coded form. I remember this letter which said, “Don't come, don't come, don't come to the war in Europe”. Later on, as the war progressed and as the recruitment levels dropped, there was forced recruitment, particularly in 1917 and 1918. For example, water would be cut off to the farmlands unless a particular number of men would volunteer from the villages. I came across this phrase when I was doing research in India: compulsory voluntary recruitment. In a way, that sums it up. Of course, there were some men who volunteered. There was a sense of honor and loyalty, but there was also this sharp economic need for the majority of Indian soldiers. It was their profession, a source of livelihood.

One of the most extraordinary discoveries in the history of war in recent years was these audio recordings, which were done between 1915 and 1918 by the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission. It was a commission formed of ethnographers, linguists, anthropologists, and they would go and record voices. We have more than 2,000 recordings, of which around 300 are of South Asian prisoners of war.

A very rare letter that has been unearthed in recent years about the whole Indian experience, about the First World War, is via this young girl, I think maybe 10 or 12 years old from Punjab, writing in Gurumukhi to her father serving in Egypt. I’ll just read it out loud. You can see the letter and its child's hand, where she has joined all the letters.

It is only after I started working on India in the First World War that I realized there were members in my own family involved. They had not been mentioned before, including one of my great uncles, Mahendranath Dass, who served as a doctor in Mesopotamia. He even got the Military Cross. Then out of the family wardrobe came his uniform medals. This is almost a metaphor of how memory functions, because it is there, but it is subterranean, buried under the nationalist layers. I keep on saying amnesia does not mean absence. The memories are there, silently and privately, and we need time and we need to dig and dig.

There is a lot of enthusiasm within India for the war efforts, because the political leaders thought that they would use it after the war to bargain for greater political autonomy. When the soldiers came back, there was a huge sense of disappointment, because it was very soon followed by the massacre in Amritsar, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, where basically these peaceful protesters were herded into this garden and gunned down. In a way, that casts its shadow over the whole First World War experience, for example, Mahatma Gandhi, one of the pacifist icons of the 20th century. He was busy recruiting Indian soldiers in 1918, and the same man in 1919 called the Indian soldiers the hired assassins of the Raj. When the soldiers came back home, there was some financial compensation but not a memorial or structure of memory that we find in Europe. Often within the same family, there was this bitter divide. These histories are not uncommon. The memory of the Indian contribution gets largely overshadowed by the nationalist movement that really took off after the First World War.