India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs
Cambridge University Press, 8/31/2018
EAN 9781107081581, ISBN10: 1107081580
Hardcover, 484 pages, 23.5 x 15.6 x 2.7 cm
Language: English
Based on ten years of research, Santanu Das's India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs recovers the sensuous experience of combatants, non-combatants and civilians from undivided India in the 1914–1918 conflict and their socio-cultural, visual, and literary worlds. Around 1.5 million Indians were recruited, of whom over a million served abroad. Das draws on a variety of fresh, unusual sources - objects, images, rumours, streetpamphlets, letters, diaries, sound-recordings, folksongs, testimonies, poetry, essays, and fiction - to produce the first cultural and literary history, moving from recruitment tactics in villages through sepoy traces and feelings in battlefields, hospitals, and POW camps to post-war reflections on Europe and empire. Combining archival excavation in different countries across several continents with investigative readings of Gandhi, Kipling, Iqbal, Naidu, Nazrul, Tagore, and Anand, this imaginative study opens up the worlds of sepoys and labourers, men and women, nationalists, artists, and intellectuals, trying to make sense of home and the world in times of war.
Introduction
Part I. The Restless Home Front
1. The imperial-nationalist self
anti-discrimination, aspiration, and anxiety
2. Sonorous fields
recruitment, resistance, and recitative in the Punjab
Part II. Race and Representation
3. Five shades of brown
the sepoy-body in visual culture
4. Imperial antibiotic
sepoy and the Raj
Part III. The Sepoy Heart
5. Touching feeling
letters, poems, prayers, and songs of sepoys in Europe 1914–18
6. 'Their lives have become ours'
occupation, captivity, and lateral contact in Mesopotamia 1914–1918
7. Transnational lives and peripheral visions
Part IV. Literary and Intellectual Cultures
8. Literary imaginings
9. The Indian English war novel
Across the Black Waters
10. Post-war world and 'the future of mankind'
Aurobindo, Iqbal, and Tagore.