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Long-lost interviews reveal the true feelings of India’s veterans of the First World War
A total of 1.5 million Indian troops served in the Indian Army during the First World War. Sailing away from the great seaports of India from 1914 under the British, for four years they fought for the Allies in Europe, Africa and Asia against the Germans and Turks. As cavalrymen they charged through French fields of corn with lances lowered; as marines they sailed the oceans; as engineers they built bridges across rivers in the jungles of Tanzania; as infantrymen they dug trenches in China; as secret agents they stole over the Himalayas into Central Asia; as prisoners of war they lost years of their lives to captivity in Germany, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The Indian Army in fact served in what are now some 50 countries, more than any other army of 1914-18. The war was truly global, and no body of men knew it more than the Indian troops. After the Allies’ Armistice with Germany 100 years ago to end the war, the white soldiers of the Western nations often put down their guns to pick up their pens. Winston Churchill, Siegfried Sassoon and many others wrote bestselling war memoirs, novels, histories and plays. But the Indians barely did the same. For decades it has generally been thought that the translated letters in London are the main source for the illiterate Indian troops’ thoughts. But a fresh discovery challenges this: long lost Indian veteran interviews which offer revelatory insights into the Indian troops’ feelings as never revealed to the censors. In the 1970s, a team led by the American historian, DeWitt Ellinwood, interviewed a number of the last surviving Indian veterans of the First World War. Ellinwood wrote down the veterans’ words in transcripts of a thousand pages which he stored for decades at his home in the U.S. A few years ago, I learned of the transcripts from a footnote in one of Ellinwood’s academic articles. I contacted him and found out that while he still had the transcripts, he was in his 80s and would not work on them further. He bestowed them on me, suggesting that I might make them publicly available to be read alongside the Indians’ translated letters. He died shortly afterwards, in 2012, but on reading the transcripts I could see why he made the suggestion. The transcripts fill in the blanks of what the Indian soldiers did not dare say in their letters under the prying British eyes. “We were slaves,” one Sikh veteran said of his war experiences of 1914-18, while another described a “curtain of fear” separating the Indian troops from the white soldiers — they were flogged by the British, paid less than their white counterparts, segregated in camps and on trains and ships, and barred from senior command. The veterans also talked of how their war service opened their minds to new ideas about casting off colonial rule. “I felt that Indians were deprived of their rights. The people in Europe were free. I felt that Indians must get freedom,” said a Punjabi veteran, Harnam Singh. “We got new ideas. Our hearts had changed,” agreed another Punjabi who had also served in Europe. “We were impressed by the sympathy and regard which the French people had shown to us. We thought that when others can regard us as their brothers and equals, why can’t the British give us the same status? We thought that the English had no regard for us. We lived in poverty under foreign rule. We should be free.” I hope the transcripts showing the veterans’ true feelings can finally be made publicly accessible in India, available to all, including families of Indian servicemen remembering their part in the world war of 100 years ago. George Morton-Jack is the author of ‘The Indian Empire at War: From Jihad to Victory, the Untold Story of the Indian Army in the First World War’
Source : https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/we-should-be-free/article25471379.ece
