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  • India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs by Santanu Das
  • Douglas Higbee
Santanu Das. India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs. Cambridge UP, 2018. xxiii + 466 pp.

The longstanding call for a more inclusive approach to First World War literature, art, and culture, one that encompasses the experiences of the non-European, the female, and the noncombatant, has resounded for quite some time—perhaps even from the day in 1975 when Paul Fussell published his seminal (but rather narrowly conceived) exploration of First World War literary culture, The Great War and Modern Memory. Indeed, the meaning of each term of our subject, as well as their interrelations—First, World, War, literature—have been interrogated and refashioned over and again, most recently in the large scholarly and pedagogical overview of the subject published by Modern Language Association, Teaching Representations of the First World War. A key aspect of the geographical issue has been that the need for such scholarly expansion has been hamstrung by a dearth of traditional literary sources. It would not be all that inaccurate to [End Page 728] say that a handful of British subalterns left behind more words than, say, the entire native population of the Indian Army.

Santanu Das’s India, Empire, and First World War Culture addresses this issue and is the culmination of work published widely in (and widely beyond) academic circles over the last decade and a half. Chief among his arguments is that we need to expand our sense of the literary: because non-Europeans did not leave behind a copious archive akin to that of European writers, we must include diaries, sound recordings, photos, trench artifacts, and other ephemera. As Das puts it, “being illiterate does not mean being non-literary” (213). Such sources, many of which have been unearthed by Das himself, help articulate the important contributions of the more than one million sepoys, Indians who served overseas in British military units during the war, mainly in the Middle East and on the Western Front. His skilled reading of the materials left behind by these men makes use of Raymond Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling” (30) to excavate not merely how the war was represented but how it felt. As he puts it, his book aims to articulate “a more intimate history of emotions” (190). And beyond his contributions to the archive and its analysis, readers will delight in Das’s eloquent and allusive writing (see if you can find the reference to Second World War-era poet Keith Douglas).

To begin with, Das links the sepoy experience to pre-independence nationalism; in one of the more enlightening claims of his book, Das writes that for most Indians in the war years “nation and empire had not yet defined themselves as antithetical terms” (51). Indeed, as Das argues in the first two chapters, debates about Indians’ role in the war “revolved not around whether the country should join in the war effort but whether it would be allowed to do so” (51). The answer to that question for many, Gandhi included, is that war service was a point of national honor and would help to soften discriminatory policies and facilitate the Empire’s recognition of Indian potential for autonomy. Events such as the 1919 Amritsar massacre proved that Britain, the crisis of war having passed, was unlikely to change course.

Chapters 3 and 4 focus on European perceptions of Indian servicemen, which veer close to but ultimately away from the usual exoticism or Orientalism. For example, the poignant but enigmatic photo on the book’s cover of a sepoy in Mesopotamia touching a propeller from the plane of two downed British airmen, erected as a memorial by the Turks, typifies Das’s emphasis on touch and emotional intimacy—the complex “structure of feeling” (23) of a colonized Indian man serving the British imperial military thousands of miles from home, reaching out to handle a memorial relic [End Page 729] created for two dead Britons by another colonized soldier-subject in a photograph taken by a European. Such ambivalent “palimpsests” (34), as Das refers to them, include the writing...

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