A European war, fought by India

Shashank Joshi, The Hindu, 07.08.2014

If World War I resonates in such a weak,
confused, and even negative way with Europeans,
it is little wonder that young Africans or Indians
see even smaller stakes in this years centenary
ceremonies. This is why it is crucial to understand
the wars global scope and the role played by the
British Empire and Commonwealth
Did you know that India fought against Britain in the First World War? That, at least, is
the belief of over a quarter of Indians, according to a British Council survey earlier this
year. It is no consolation that the situation is little better in Europe. Two years ago,
another survey showed that over half of Britons didnt know whether India had
contributed over 1,000 troops. This might be a forgivable gap in knowledge, if the real
figure were not well over a million.
As Commonwealth heads of state in Glasgow commemorated the First World War
centenary on Monday, many in the nations of the Commonwealth India above all
will therefore wonder why they should care about, much less commemorate, a war
fought largely in Europe, led by European politicians, commanded by European officers,
and resolved to the benefit of engorged European empires.
Wars legacy
This uninterest is understandable. Even at home, in the wars European locales, we are
separated from its horrors not just by the chasm of multiple generations the wars last
veteran, Florence Green, died in February 2012 at the age of 110 but also a growing
cultural gap. In a nation of immigrants, increasing numbers of children have grown up
without the childhood visits to memorial-strewn French villages or classroom recitation
of the war poets that were once ubiquitous. No surprise, then, that a survey in 2012
found that fewer than half of Britons aged 16 to 24 could identify the year that the war
broke out.
The wars legacy has also grown more complicated, as evidenced in the United Kingdom
by last years political skirmishing among politicians and historians. The (now former)
British Education Minister, Michael Gove, attacked the left-wing narrative of a cruel and
futile war prosecuted by feckless generals. He argued, instead, those who fought were
not dupes but conscious believers in king and country, committed to defending the
western liberal order. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, agreed, insisting, German
militarism was at the root of the First World War.
In turn, a slew of prominent historians, led by the Regius Professor of History at the
University of Cambridge, Richard Evans, retorted that Britain and her allies had fought
for dubious aims, against adversaries who were far from evil incarnate. As the writer
Kenan Malik put it in a recent essay, Germany had expansionist aims and a toxically
racist culture. Britain, however, was not much different. Perhaps, these sceptics
implied, triumphalism ought to be avoided in the centenary commemorations.
If the war resonates in such a weak, confused, and even negative way with Europeans, it
is little wonder that young Africans or Indians see even smaller stakes in this years
ceremonies. This is why it is crucial to understand the global scope of the war, and the
role often an involuntary one played by the Empire and Commonwealth. The wars
origins may lie in the Balkans, and it may be the European battlefields that stick in
popular memory the Somme, Ypres, and so on but the non-European world was
profoundly affected, and in turn transformed by the war.
Sourcing manpower
Remember that British forces in the Gold Coast (modern day Ghana) mobilised four
days before the British declaration of war, that the first Allied shots were fired in the
British and French invasion of German Togoland, and that the first Allied victory came
here, not in Europe. Paris and London would later carve up that territory, like so many
other spoils of war.
In addition to being a battleground, the British Empire also served as a reservoir of
manpower on an astonishing scale; 1,40,000 men served in the Chinese Labour Corps, a
force of which most Europeans will never have heard. The West Indies contributed
16,000 men. As John Reader explains in his magisterial history, Africa: A Biography of
the Continent, by the wars end, around two million Africans had participated in the war
effort, half of them troops. Around 2,00,000 died. The French colonies alone sent just
under half-a-million Africans to fight in Europe, over a tenth of these coming from
Algeria. Kenya, Ghana and, above all, Nigeria which provided the lions share for
Britain.
It is also crucial not to mince words on the nature of this participation. At first, much
recruitment was, notionally, voluntary. But, as in India, local political elites were
incentivised to supply manpower, and they used all means at their disposal to push
villagers into service. As the historian Ranajit Guha explained to journalist Seema
Sirohi, a widespread proxy system developed in the Punjab, whereby a prosperous
villager would buy a poor neighbours son and donate him to the recruitment centre as
his own contribution. Eventually, the French, the British, the Germans and the
Belgians all used the force of law and arms to compel Africans to join their armies.
How were these troops used? Overall, 6,50,000 colonial troops were deployed to
Europe. The French, in particular, sent Africans to Europe in large numbers. Senegalese
battalions served with distinction at Ypres, for instance, and tens of thousands of
African troops even stayed behind for the post-war occupation of the Rhineland (in
Mein Kampf, Hitler complained that Jews were responsible for bringing Blacks into the
Rhineland). The academic Christian Koller notes that one French general believed West
Africans made good soldiers because of their underdeveloped nervous system and their
hereditary fatalism, permitting them to sleep in trenches if necessary.
London took a different line (despite the urgings of the War Office and others, like
Winston Churchill). Much as Britain refused to train African-American soldiers who had
entered the war, and rejected Indian participation in the Crimean and Boer Wars, it
similarly recoiled from the idea of pitting Africans against white soldiers, and with the
exception of some deployments to the Middle East preferred to use them mostly
within Africa against other Africans.
Indian contribution
The Empires biggest contribution was by India. This included 3.7 million tonnes of
supplies, over 10,000 nurses, 1,70,000 animals, 146m of Indian revenue, and political
support including that of Gandhi, who helped recruit Indian volunteers in the face of
nationalist opposition. But most important of all was the Indian Army, the largest
volunteer force in the world, which provided 1.1 million troops to serve overseas,
principally in the form of six expeditionary forces labelled A to F. Over 74,000 were
killed five times more than the combined death toll from every war that India has
fought since independence and 80,000 were held prisoner. As the Conservative
politician Baroness Sayeeda Warsi put it last year, our boys werent just Tommies
they were Tariqs and Tajinders too.
It would take volumes to list their achievements in full. These forces not only protected
the northwest of India, but also buttressed British garrisons in Egypt, Singapore and
China, as well as contributing to seminal battles of the Western Front, such as the
Somme and Neuve Chapelle. At Ypres, in particular, Indian casualties were
exceptionally high, compounded by the shock of German chlorine gas in April 1915.
But Indian forces had their greatest impact in West Asia, with 60 per cent of all Indian
troops serving in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), and another 10 per cent in Egypt and
Palestine. As recorded in a new book by Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, The First World War
in the Middle East, British and Indian troops in Mesopotamia suffered over 2,00,000
casualties from sickness alone in just one year, 1916. On Jerusalems capture the next
year, it was Indian Muslim troops who were tasked with protecting the Dome of the
Rock.
When the Viceroy laid the foundation stone for India Gate in 1921, he declared, the
stirring tales of individual heroism will live for ever in the annals of this country. Six
years later, French Marshal Ferdinand Foch told Indians gathered at Neuve Chapelle,
proclaim how your countrymen drenched with their blood the cold northern land of
France and Flanders. These words have faded. No surprise, in an age when the newly
appointed head of the Indian Council of Historical Research is a man more interested in
questions like, Why are the fish and the pebbles in Ganga not attaining Moksha? than
supporting real history. For the Indians who fought for the Empire, earning a staggering
13,000 gallantry medals in the process, this legacy of ignorance is a scandal.
(Shashank Joshi is a Senior Research Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute in
London, and a PhD candidate at Harvard University.)