Great War Armistice Centenary - Indians in the trenches: voices of forgotten army are finally to be heard. By Harriet Sherwood
They were the forgotten
voices of the first world war: 1.5 million men, mostly illiterate villagers
from northern India,
fighting under the command of colonial masters who repaid their bravery and
sacrifices with brutality and prejudice. More Indians fought
with the British from 1914 to 1918 than the combined total of Australian, New
Zealand, Canadian and South African troops. Some 34,000 Indian soldiers were
killed on battlefields in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. But the part they
played in the war has been largely whitewashed from history.
Now, just
before the 11 November armistice centenary, the last testimonies of the British
Empire’s first world war Indian servicemen – 1,000 pages of veteran interview
transcripts – have been offered to the British Library. The first-hand
accounts paint a picture of racial segregation and discrimination alongside
extraordinary bravery and an awakening hunger for civil rights and
independence.
Oral histories were
taken from Indian veterans in the 1970s by a team led by DeWitt Ellinwood, an
American historian and anthropologist. Transcripts of the recordings have been
offered to the British Library by George Morton-Jack, a British historian who
traced the material to Ellinwood’s house in upstate New York where it had been
stored for decades. Many of the Hindus,
Muslims and Sikhs who served under British command came from poor villages in
colonial Punjab and other rural areas.
Until now, the best known source on
their service has been the letters home from a small proportion of Indian
soldiers on the western front, translations of which are held in the British Library and are available
online. The letters – mostly
dictated to scribes by illiterate Indian soldiers – were composed in the
knowledge that they would be read by censors. “They were careful about what
they said. They knew dissent could be punished by the British as their colonial
masters. So they habitually held back their true feelings,” said Morton-Jack,
the author of The Indian Empire at War.
“But the interviews
show they had a strong sense of the racial discrimination they suffered under
the British, and their growing belief that they should have civil rights, they
shouldn’t be subject to colonial domination, and they should live in their own
free country. They describe how those feelings developed through the war,” he
said... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/27/armistice-centenary-indian-troops-testimony-sacrifice-british-libraryMore posts on World War 1
