Book review: The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-1921
The Allied victory in the First World War was won on the back of the labour of non-combatant ‘coolies’, whose deployment allowed for swift mobilisation across fronts. A new book narrates the story of their struggles on the battlefields and of their neglect.
Radhika Singha, The Coolie’s Great War: Indian
Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-1921
Reviewed by Vipul Datta
Against the backdrop of the First World War centenary,
commemoration efforts to honour the ‘soldierly sacrifice’ of Indians and
Africans have come up short on acknowledging the non-fighting labour that kept
the Allied war operations from collapsing. Tasked with maintaining
transportation networks, upkeep of military equipment, cleaning up barracks and
forced into a bevy of non-remunerative work including clearing human and
draught waste, this labour was essential to enable swift mobilisation of troops
and resources across multiple battlefronts.
Placed firmly in the fetid, smoke-filled trenches and desert
wastes of wartime France and Mesopotamia (broadly present-day Iraq), Radhika
Singha’s fabulous new book is a stirring account of the hapless lives of the
‘follower’ non-combatant ranks of the celebrated fighting arms of the Indian
army which formed the largest voluntary expeditionary forces assembled in the
War. It pieces together in painstaking detail the little known story of the
dual struggles of countless coercively drafted labour and porter corps, who
first kept the wheels of the war running and then ‘fought’ again in the vain
hope of getting their work respected through the Raj’s financial munificence.
Her narrative of the parsimonious financial and institutional support lent to
the non-combatant personnel drawn from diverse areas from the Indian
subcontinent offers a useful corrective to the idea of war being only a
‘combatant event’.
A new kind of war
As the 1900s rolled over, wars became more deeply enmeshed
in the drift of larger geopolitical imperatives. European rivalries sitting
atop a tinderbox of 19th-century imperial resentments radiated waves of
cataclysmic disruptions that would punctuate the course of the 20th century….
https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/other-indians-first-world-war
More posts on the Great War
The Christmas truce, 1914 - Steven Johns
