Over the past few decades, a number of books have reminded us that World War I was far from being an exclusively or even primarily European...
Over the past few decades, a number of books have reminded us that World War I was far from being an exclusively or even primarily European conflict. Scholars have pointed to the presence of non-white soldiers in huge numbers, including more than a million from the British Indian Army, and the broad geographical expanse across which they were deployed, from France to Gallipoli to East Africa to Mesopotamia.
In her new book, The Coolie’s War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-1921, Radhika Singha expands our lenses even further. Singha, a professor of modern history at Jawaharlal Nehru University whose research has focused on the social history of crime and criminal law, tells us the stories of the more than half a million Indian non-combatants who played key roles in the war, providing the basic logistics and infrastructure that underpinned the victorious efforts of the British empire.
I spoke to Singha about researching this complicated subject, how British ideas of categorisation changed over the course of the conflict, whether these Indians came back with different world views and political tendencies, and why military histories need to begin engaging with gender, caste and come out of its silo.
