- India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images and Songs by Santanu Das
Accustomed as we are as historians, in the past three decades or so, to have literary critics write history for us, or indeed tell us what history is (and in this we are accompanied in our fate by the tribe formerly known as philosophers), it is probably at least necessary to acknowledge that some of these critics can be better writers than the average historian. So it is with Santanu Das's account of the First World War and India's place in it, told as a series of disconnected literary vignettes, in which the narrator is present in the first person as the retrospective flâneur through the fields of Flanders, aestheticizing the Great War in a postcolonial direction, while reminding readers that we/they were there too. The book is more a compilation of sources, pictures, and anecdotes by a curator than a "history"—but in this age of post-authorial texts, is it necessary to blame the author for this inflated claim? It is, of course, publishers who decide how to label and market a text. The author, for his part, tells us frankly (quoting Novalis), that "literature fills in the gaps left by history" (p. vi), thereby potentially absolving himself of all responsibility for readers' expectations: should they choose to read this as a history book, it is their own fault.
The resultant production is something like a coffee-table book produced on the cheap, each of its many illustrations—for instance, a pair of glasses with a bloodstain on it, scarcely visible with the passage of time and having to be attested to by author and museum caption (p. 2); or a postcard in Punjabi in a child's [End Page 195] handwriting to her father away at the front (p. 7)— goading us with cattle prods towards affect, that watchword of woke academic writing in an age of social media "likes." Das's writing skills are indeed better than those of an average historian, but below average for a writer with literary pretensions. The contrived elegance of the prose is marred by the overuse of cliché and trowel loads of sentimentality. The book's stories resemble anecdotes that historians working together in an archive tell to one another during the lunch break, before the anecdotes have taken their place in an argument or a narrative framing. I struggle to find an argument in this book: the introduction makes at least four false starts in trying to make an originality claim. The fragmented structure of the book is consistent with its status as compilation or catalogue. If it has a respectable genealogy, it might be Oh! What a Lovely War, which similarly relied on first-person testimony and song for its material; but Das's account is devoid of irony or humour, and without the satirical antiwar politics of that theatrical and movie production.
The book is divided into four parts, covering "home," recruitment, and resistance; racialized representations of "the sepoy" (Das's shorthand for all Indians at war, apparently a conscious decision of his to use a contemporaneous term, but then inconsistently and clumsily handled); "the sepoy heart" (yes, seriously), a section on Indian writing during the war, much of which is from others' anthologies, in translation, or translated for Das; and "literary and intellectual cultures." As the book proceeds, and in particular in the last two sections, where "Indian" voices are given space, Das climbs up the class hierarchy, from subaltern to officer to Indians serving in British regiments to intellectuals at home; he perhaps finds his comfort zone in the end.
Is there an argument, somewhere between the statistics of the participants, the dead, and the wounded (from official wartime publications, serving to give the book an appearance of rigour by reproducing, unchanged, a number of these tables), and the fragments of stories? Das claims he "engages with the power and poignancy of his [the sepoy's] story through a more diverse collection of...