Read the article: Europe Through Indian Eyes: Indian Soldiers Encounter England and France, 1914-1918.” Choose one question for your first post; respond to one classmate for your second post.
Questions:
Where in India were most of the soldiers recruited for World War I? Why?What was the experience of Indian soldiers at the hospitals in Brighton, England? What were some of the problems that their presence raised? Why?What was the experience of Indian soldiers in France? Was it different from the experience of the soldiers in England? Why?What were some of the concerns of religious soldiers created by their prolonged stay in France? Why?Is there anything in this reading that you did not know or find surprising? Why? [BONUS QUESTION for extra points]
Step 1: Read the source and pick one question and identify an aspect of Indian participation in World War I that you find intriguing. Use the link for the British Library for additional information.
Step 2: Write a 150-200 word response analyzing the readings.
Use a word processor (like MS Word) to write your response to the readings you have selected.
Europe Through Indian Eyes: Indian Soldiers Encounter England and France, 1914-1918 Europe Through Indian Eyes: Indian Soldiers Encounter England and France, 1914-1918 Source: The English Historical Review, Vol. 122, No. 496 (Apr., 2007), pp. 371-396 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4493808 Accessed: 03-11-2016 02:26 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The English Historical Review This content downloaded from 137.125.248.76 on Thu, 03 Nov 2016 02:26:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms English Historical Review Vol. CXXII No. 496 doi: 10.1093/ehr/cem004 ? The Author [2007]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Europe Through Indian Eyes: Indian Soldiers Encounter England and France, I9I4-IpI8* THE cross-cultural encounters resulting from intra-imperial population movements have long been of interest to historians. There is an extensive historiography on trade, exploration and settlement; on the forced migrations of African slavery; on the diaspora of Indian indentured labourers and on the activities of Christian missionaries overseas.' Much of this literature is concerned with European travel within the Empire or with indigenous people moving between the Empire's constituent parts. Colonial visitors and migrants to Britain during the imperial heyday have, until recently, attracted rather less attention. Although there are some significant studies of the ways in which West Indians and Africans viewed and experienced Victorian and Edwardian Britain,2 it is the history of Indian people in Britain which has lately been taken more seriously.3 * I am grateful to the University of Hull and the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) for funding the study leave in 2003-4 which enabled me to complete this project. Michael Turner commented on a research proposal, and Clare Omissi, Douglas Reid and Andrew Thompson made many valuable suggestions after reading early drafts. I benefited from presenting papers based on work in progress to the History Seminar at the University of Hull in October 2003 and to the Imperial History Seminar at the University of London in January 2004. A shorter version was read at the Annual Conference of the Society for Military History at the University of Maryland in May 2004. Owen Jell of Brighton Archives provided newspaper and other material about Indian soldiers in Brighton. All documentary references are to material held in the India Office Library in London, where the staff has, as ever, given me much assistance. Square brackets in the footnotes indicate authorial interpolations, and question marks indicate conjecture. I. On trade, see P. D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, 1984); on indigenous-settler relations, see L. Russell (ed.), Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies (Manchester, 200oo) and J. Evans, P. Grimshaw, D. Philips and S. Swain, Equal Suijects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies (Manchester, 2003); on indentured labour, see H. Tinker, A New System ofSlavery: The Export ofIndian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (London, 1974), K. Saunders (ed.), Indentured Labour in the British Empire, 1834-I920 (London, 1984) and D. Northrup, Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922 (Cambridge, 1995); on David Livingstone, see A. Ross, David Livingstone: Mission and Empire (Hambledon and London, 2002); on missionaries in India, see J. M. Brown and R. E. Frykenberg (ed.), Christians, Cultural Interactions, and India's Religious Traditions (Grand Rapids, Cambridge and London, 2002); and on missionaries more generally, see A. N. Porter, 'Cultural Imperialism and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 1780-1914', Journal oflmperial and Commonwealth History, xxv (1997). 2. See for example, D. Killingray, Africans in Britain (London, 1994); J. Green, Black Edwardians: Black People in Britain, IpoI-19p4 (London, 1998); N. Parsons, KingKhama, Emperor Joe and the Great White Queen: Victorian Britain ThroughAfrican Eyes (Chicago, 1998). 3. R. Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 17oo-1947 (London, 1986). For an updated edition, see R. Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years ofHistory (London, 2002). See also works cited in n 5 and n 6. EHR, cxxii. 496 (April 2007) This content downloaded from 137.125.248.76 on Thu, 03 Nov 2016 02:26:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 372 EUROPE THROUGH INDIAN EYES Who made up this Indian presence? In the early 19oos, some 40- 50,ooo Asian sailors served in Britain's merchant navy: the majority of these were from India, and many of them would have worked ashore in British ports.4 There were also Indians in smaller numbers elsewhere. Queen Victoria, keen to live up to her role as Empress of India, emp- loyed several Indian servants, including a cook.5 In addition, there was an Indian elite, concentrated in Oxford, Cambridge and London. Besides Indian Princes and would-be Indian Civil Servants, it included students (such as the future social activist Cornelia Sorabji and the future satyagrahi M. K. Gandhi), and politicians, like the veteran Congressman and Radical critic of India's subordinate position within the Empire, Dadabhai Naoroji, and the Conservative MP and pro- imperialist Sir M. M. Bhownaggree.6 A very different South Asian presence in Europe followed the out- break of war in 19I4. Indian soldiers arrived in their tens of thousands to defend France and Belgium. Although these military contingents included representatives of educated India-vets and medics for example-the majority of the soldiers were drawn from the minor rural gentry and the middle peasantry. There was also a regional divide between the soldiers and the educated elite. Whereas the elite came mainly from the big cities, especially Calcutta, Poona and Bombay, the soldiers-largely as a result of the strategy of recruiting from the so- called 'martial races'-were drawn mainly from the warrior peasantry of Northern India, especially Punjab, Nepal, the United Provinces and the North-West Frontier.7 Furthermore, the troops had arrived in wartime, for military rather than academic, legal or political purposes. Indian soldiers therefore brought to bear on Europe, and on European mores, an Asian perspective significantly different from that of their less numerous, if perhaps more vocal, elite compatriots. 4. Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes, 34-54 and Appendix III. 5. S. Mathur, An Indian Encounter: Portraitsfor Queen Victoria (London, 2002). 6. On Indian Princes, see M. Rodrigues, Battingfor the Empire: A Political Biography of Ranjitsinhji (New Delhi, 2oo003), chs 1-2 and S. Lahiri, 'British Policy Towards Indian Princes in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Britain', Immigrants and Minorities, xv (1996); on students, see S. Lahiri, Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 188o-p93o (London, 2000); on Cornelia Sorabji, see A. Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley, 1998); on Gandhi, see J. M. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner ofHope (New Haven and London, 1989) ch. I and D. Arnold, Gandhi (Harlow and London, 2001), 34-41; for Naoroji and Bhownaggree, see J. Schneer, London Ipoo: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven, 1999) chs 8 and Io, and Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes, 76-97. 7. According to the 'martial races' strategy, which flourished from the 188os to the 1930s, British administrators classified South Asia's various communities as either 'martial races' or 'unwarlike'. The Indian Army recruited only from the 'martial races', most of whom were poorly educated agriculturalists with few or no connections to the nationalist movement. See G. F. MacMunn, The Martial Races oflndia (London, 1933); D. E. Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 186o-1940 (Basingstoke, 1994), ch. I; L. Caplan, Warrior Gentlemen: 'Gurkhas' in the Western Imagination (Providence and Oxford, 1995); and H. Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, I857-1914 (Manchester, 2004). EHR, cxxii. 496 (April 2007) This content downloaded from 137.125.248.76 on Thu, 03 Nov 2016 02:26:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms EUROPE THROUGH INDIAN EYES 373 While the battlefield experience of Indian soldiers has attracted some scholarly attention,8 much less is known about their life behind the lines in France, where, like most of the troops on the Western Front, they spent much of their time.9 This article will investigate the ways in which these Indian soldiers viewed, and interacted with, British and French society in wartime. It draws extensively on their surviving correspondence with their families to consider how they reflected upon their encounter with various aspects of the European world-its wealth and education, its religion and secularism and its gender roles and family life. It also considers how the soldiers' stay in Europe encouraged them to reflect upon, and sometimes to reconsider, Indian mores. In so doing, the article will add breadth and depth to our understanding of South Asian experience overseas before 1918, and will suggest some fresh ways of thinking about the impact of cross-cultural encounters. The wisdom of using Indian troops in Europe, or against European opponents outside India, had been debated in imperial circles for some time. To maintain white prestige, and to avoid antagonising the Cape Dutch, Indian soldiers were not employed against the Boers in the South African War ofi 899-1902.10 In 1911, however, the Committee of Imperial Defence had considered the possibility of sending three Indian divisions to Europe, in the event of war.11 On 5 August 1914, the day after Britain declared war on Germany, the War Council recommended instead that