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Indian troops marching through France in 1914

India & The Great War

The Times of India

The First World War, or The Great War, as it was then known as, was reported extensively by the then British owned Times of India, with stark details of battles and other events. In particular, the valour of thousands of Indian troops fighting for the British found mention a number of times.

A TOI report dated June 4, 1915 said, “A few weeks ago some papers of the baser sort were hinting at what they were pleased to call the failure of the Indian troops at the front. The object of this was never clear, but it is obvious that the reports must have given enormous pleasure to the Germans who are always glad of an excuse to express their contempt and resentment at the employment of Indian troops against them. The nation which uses poisonous gases and which poisons wells can of course afford to be particular about such matters as the colour of the soldiers whom it fights. But whatever lies and base suggestions may have been circulated, the Germans long ago found out the quality of the men sent to fight them, and in today’s list of the recipients of the Order of British India and the Indian Order of Merit will be found a number of cases recorded in which Indians have shown the greatest gallantry under fire.”

The Suez Canal

The report goes on to describe an incident where Indian troops showed exemplary courage under fire.

“Havildar (now Jemadar) Suba Singh, 56th Punjabi Rifles Frontier Force, in command of a patrol o f nine men on the Suez Canal, surprised and engaged a strong raiding party of Turks estimated at 400 under German officers, and in the fight that ensued he showed a determined front and fought with great gallantry. Although severely wounded, Havildar Suba Singh continued to lead and encourage his men and extricated his patrol from a very difficult situation with a loss of two killed and three wounded, whilst the losses to the enemy were estimated at 12 killed and 15 wounded.”

German praise

Even the Germans had a word of praise for India’s soldiers. A December 5, 1914 report in TOI said: “The Frankfurter Zeitung publishes a letter from a German soldier showing that the Germans are beginning to realize the fighting qualities of the Indians. He says: — “We at first spoke with contempt of the Indians, but today we have learned to regard them in a different light, and they will certainly not be underrated. We lay for three days under shellfire, lacking the barest necessities, and then had a visit from the Indians”.

“The Devil knows what the English have put into those fellows. They stormed our lines as though they possessed an evil spirit, with fearful shouts, compared to which our hurrahs are like the whining of a baby. Thousands rushed at us suddenly as if they had been shot out of the fog.”

“We opened a destructive fire, mowing down hundreds, but others advanced, springing like cats and surmounting obstacles with marvelous agility. They entered our trenches in no time and fought with butt-ends, bayonets, swords and daggers. We had bitter hard work till reinforcements arrived.”

Another article describes Indian troops arriving in France as “a fascinating and mysterious invasion from the Arabian Nights”. The French writer even imagines “Gurkhas creeping at night through the mud towards the enemy’s patrols like tigers”.

10-year-olds enlisted by British

The Times of India, Oct 26 2015

UK enlisted Indian kids as young as 10 in WWI army  Britain's World War I army included Indian children as young as 10-years-old fighting against the Germans on the western front, according to a new book on the role of Indian soldiers in the Great War. The youngsters were shipped over to France from the far reaches of the British Empire to carry out support roles, but were so close to the front line that many were wounded and admitted to hospital, according to `For King and Another Country: Indian Soldiers on the Western Front 1914-18'. The account by writer and historian Shrabani Basu is based on official papers at the National Archives and British Library . Some of the Indian children, including a 10-year-old “bellows blower“, and two grooms, both 12, provided support to cavalry regiments, a `Sunday Times' report said.

One of the youngest boys involved in direct combat was a “brave little Gurkha“ called Pim, 16, who was given an award for valour by Queen Mary while he was recuperating in hospital in Brighton.

Basu believes many of the children came from poor families and that they would have lied about their age at recruitment offices in India, where they were encouraged to sign up for a monthly salary of 11 rupees. “In the case of a 10-year-old, it should have been pretty obvious that they were underage,“ she told the newspaper.

This embarrassment was shared by some British offici als. In one dispatch to Lord Kitchener, secretary of state for war, Walter Lawrence, a civil servant tasked with overseeing injured Indian troops, wrote: “It seems a great pity that children should have been allowed to come to Europe.“ About 1.5 million Indian soldiers fought for Britain in the WWI, with a handful being awarded the Victoria Cross bravery medal.

Martyrs

A century on, World War I martyrs to be remembered

New Delhi

The Times of India Jul 29 2014

On July 28, 1914 Austria-Hungary fired the first shots to invade Serbia. Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination by a Serbian nationalist a month earlier had proved to be the final straw, even though tensions were escalating for quite some time. This set in motion a chain of events, with Britain declaring war on Germany on August 4, which triggered a conflagration the like of which the world had never witnessed till then. World War-I would last over four years, from 1914 to November 1918, with around nine million troops and many more civilians being killed.

Around 62,000 of them were Indian troops, with another 67,000 being wounded in the trench-to-trench warfare-the norm then. Over a million Indian troops, each paid Rs 11 per month, under the British flag took active part in World War-I, from Sonne and Flanders in France to Gallipoli and Canakkale in Turkey.

“An Independent India may not choose to remember the soldiers who laid down their lives since they were fighting for the British Empire. A soldier is a soldier, whichever the political dispensation that directs him to go to war may be,” said a major-general.All of the 30 regiments or units that took part in the “Great War” and are still part of the Indian Army, from Skinner’s Horse and Madras Regiment to Gorkha and Garhwal Rifles, commemorate their own “Battle Honour Days” in their own unique way.

Indians who lorded over European skies in WWI

Manimugdha S Sharma,TNN | Oct 8, 2014 The Times of India

Hardit Singh Malik.

Lt Indra Lal Roy in RFC uniform.

The First World War had 1.3 million Indians fighting in every theatre of the conflict. A handful of them fought in the air, and one of them became the first Indian fighter ace. Yet outside the Indian Air Force, which celebrated its 82nd anniversary on Wednesday, there seems to be little awareness about the role of India's air warriors in the Great War.

Gurdit Singh Malik

It all started with a Sikh student studying in Oxford expressing his wish to join the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) in 1917, when the war had reached a crescendo. Sardar Gurdit Singh Malik was initially denied permission to join the force; he was instead asked to serve as an orderly in an Indian military hospital. "He had to overcome institutional racism to become a fighter pilot for the British before he took on the Germans," said Harbakhsh Grewal of UK Punjab Heritage Association, one of the organizers of the widely acclaimed 'Empire, Faith, War: The Sikhs and World War One' exhibition in Britain.

A disappointed Malik then went to France to help out the beleaguered French as an ambulance driver. There, too, he asked if he could volunteer in the air force. The French agreed. Malik then wrote to his tutor in Oxford about it, who then took it up with the chief of the RFC and said it would be an embarrassment if a British subject had to be employed by the French. "That's when I heard from General Henderson, chief of RFC, who asked me to see him. After that meeting, I was sent for training and got a commission in the RFC as a fighter pilot," Malik had said in a TV interview in the early 1980s. Malik became the first Indian fighter pilot of the RFC, which became the Royal Air Force during the war. With a precedent thus set, the RFC opened its doors to Indians.

Malik shot down six German fighters in those early days of aerial combat when fighter pilots tried to shoot each other down with pistols and rifles when they came too close to each other. The life expectancy of fighter pilots in those days was just 10 days in combat. Yet Malik survived the war despite being wounded in action.

Malik's squadron also duelled with Manfred von Richthofen, the famous 'Red Baron'. But despite his kills, Malik was officially credited with only two and missed out on the title of 'ace' (a pilot who downed five or more enemy aircraft). That credit went to another Indian pilot, Lieutenant Indra Lal "Laddie" Roy.

Lt Indra Lal Roy

Roy was studying in London and had just turned 18 when he volunteered for the RFC. He got a commission and was placed with no. 56 squadron first before being transferred to no. 40 squadron. In just 170 hours of flying, Roy shot down 10 enemy aircraft, thus becoming a full ace. Roy didn't survive the war. He was shot down in July 1918, aged just 19. He was awarded with a Distinguished Flying Cross posthumously.

Two other Indian pilots who saw action on the Western Front were Lieutenant Srikrishna Welingkar and Lieutenant Eroll Chunder Sen. Welingkar, like Roy, didn't survive, while Sen became a German PoW, released only after the war. Malik joined the Indian Civil Service and had a distinguished career. He became Independent India's first high commissioner to Canada, and Jawahalal Nehru is believed to have made him Indian ambassador to France to use his goodwill among the French to settle the return of French colonies to India. Britain, however, always remembered Malik as the "turbaned young fighter pilot who shot down Germans in the air".

Indian soldiers in France

The Times of India

Shashi Tharoor, December 09 2014

Little is known of Indian soldiers who fought World War I, in the war's centenary.

Exactly 100 years after the “guns of August” boomed across the European continent, the world has been extensively commemorating that seminal event. The Great War, as it was called then, was described at the time as “the war to end all wars“. But while the war took the flower of Europe's youth to their premature graves, snuffing out the lives of a generation of talented poets, artists, cricketers and others whose genius bled into the trenches, it also involved soldiers from faraway lands that had little to do with Europe's bitter traditional hatreds. Of the 1.3 million Indian troops who served in the conflict, however, you hear very little.

The most painful experiences were those of soldiers fighting in the trenches of Europe. Letters sent by Indian soldiers in France and Belgium to their family members in their villages back home speak an evocative language of cultural dislocation and tragedy. “The shells are pouring like rain in the monsoon,“ declared one. “The corpses cover the country like sheaves of harvested corn,“ wrote another.

The British raised men and money from India, as well as large supplies of food, cash and ammunition, collected both by British taxation of Indians and from the nominally autonomous princely states. In return, the British had insincerely promised to deliver progressive self-rule to India at the end of the war.

Mahatma Gandhi, who returned to his homeland for good from South Africa in January 1915, supported the war, as he had supported the British in the Boer War. The great Nobel prize-winning poet, Rabindranath Tagore, was somewhat more sardonic about nationalism: “We, the famished, ragged ragamuffins of the East are to win freedom for all humanity!“ he wrote during the war. “We have no word for `Nation' in our language.“

India's absence from the commemo rations, and its failure to honour the dead, were not a major surprise: the general feeling was that India was ashamed of its soldiers' participation in a colonial war and saw nothing to celebrate.

But the centenary is finally forcing a rethink. Remarkable photographs have been unearthed of Indian soldiers in Europe and the Middle East, and these are enjoying a new lease of life online.Looking at them, i find it impossible not to be moved: these young men, visibly so alien to their surroundings, some about to head off for battle, others nursing terrible wounds.

My favourite picture is of a bearded and turbaned Indian soldier on horseback in Mesopotamia in 1918, leaning over in his saddle to give his rations to a starving local peasant girl. This spirit of compassion has been repeatedly expressed by Indian peacekeeping units in UN operations since, from helping Lebanese civilians in the Indian battalion's field hospital to treating the camels of Somali nomads. It embodies the ethos the Indian solider brings to soldiering, whether at home or abroad.

For many Indians, curiosity has overcome the fading colonial-era resentments of British exploitation. We are beginning to see the soldiers of World War I as human beings, who took the spirit of their country to battlefields abroad. The Centre for Armed Forces Historical Research in Delhi is painstakingly working to retrieve memorabilia of that era and reconstruct the forgotten story of the 1.3 million Indian soldiers who had served in World War I. Some of the letters are unbearably poignant, especially those urging relatives back home not to commit the folly of enlisting in this futile cause. Others hint at delights officialdom frowned upon; some Indian soldiers' appreciative comments about the receptivity of Frenchwomen to their attentions, for instance.

Astonishingly , almost no fiction has emerged from or about the perspective of the Indian troops. But Indian literature touched the war experience in one tragic tale. When the great British poet Wilfred Owen (author of the greatest anti-war poem in the English language, `Dulce et Decorum est') was to return to the front to give his life in the futile World War I, he recited Tagore's `Parting Words' to his mother as his last goodbye. When he was so tragically and pointlessly killed, Owen's mother found Tagore's poem copied out in her son's hand in his diary .

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission maintains war cemeteries in India, mostly commemorating World War II. The most famous epitaph of them all is inscribed at the Kohima war cemetery in northeast India. It reads, “When you go home, tell them of us and say For your tomorrow, we gave our today .“

The Indian soldiers who died in World War I could make no such claim.They gave their “todays“ for someone else's “yesterdays“. They left behind orphans, but history has orphaned them as well. As Imperialism has bitten the dust, it is recalled increasingly for its repression and racism, and its soldiers, when not reviled, are largely regarded as having served an unworthy cause.

But they were men who did their duty, as they saw it. And they were Indians. It is a matter of quiet satisfaction that their overdue rehabilitation has now begun.

Indian solders in World War 1: Vedica Kant

The Times of India

Dec 24 2014

In WWI, Indian soldiers proved a match for Germans ­ 30 years later, India was independent

Vedica Kant from Oxford University has authored a book on India and World War I, titled “If I die here, who will remember me?” Speaking with Manimugdha S Sharma, Kant discussed why India must commemorate Indian soldiers who fought in the great war, how exposure to the West changed Indian minds ­ and a crucial link between WWI and Indian freedom: Is WWI's centenary important for India?

The centenary is not about celebration ­ it's about remembrance. The fact is, nearly one and a half million Indians took part. The world we know today was also shaped by them. We can't just write them out of history . We must accept them as part of our history ­ we have to talk about them.

Many people, including Justice Markandey Katju, seem to think Indian soldiers who participated were mercenaries and need no remembrance ­ your view?

That mercenary argument doesn't hold water because as soldiers they had the same motivations soldiers have today ­ pay , honour and attachment to their regiment and fellow soldiers. These Indians were professional soldiers with years of fighting experience.

In addition, they often felt they were doing their duty by fighting for the Empire ­ people like Mahatma Gandhi, Tilak and others thought that by sending troops to fight the war, India would prove worthy of demanding dominion status and put Britain under a moral debt to grant home rule ­ they recruited people for the war.

People who went to war with the backing of people of this country can't be called mercenaries.

Indian soldiers went to the western front, exposed to a new kind of war and setting ­ how did this impact them?

The Indian soldier, for the first time, upset the racial hierarchy that European powers maintained in their colonies. It was an unwritten convention that only white soldiers would be fielded against white troops in Europe ­ Britain and France broke this convention, out of dire need, if nothing else. Germany protested against this.

Indian soldiers had very receptive minds. They could spot how advanced Europe was, how economically better off its people were. They understood how worse off they were. But there was another realisation ­ that the Indian soldier wasn't inferior to any white soldier. In fact, he was proving more than a match for the German soldier. This realisation gave a sense of equality, a new confidence in his abilities.

This individual experience combined with a global milieu in which self determination was climbing up the agenda ­ it also impacted the freedom movement back home in India.

In 30 years from World War I, India became independent.

Many Indian soldiers formed relationships with European women ­ did this change them?

Indian soldiers noticed white women were educated. They also took up jobs left by men who went to war. This impressed the troops very much. Many wrote home about it, telling their families how important it was to be educated. Many talked about educating their girl children equally as boys.

This wasn't just a passing thought, after the war, many came home and sent their girls to school.

A century post the war

India Today

Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala inspects a Guard OF Honour in France.

A group of Sikhs pose with children of Le Sart, a French village where they were billeted.

Manu Pubby

December 10, 2014

It has taken a century to capture the extraordinary tales of over a million Indians who sailed far from home, defying tradition and even religious belief, to take part in a war they did not understand, in a land they did not care about and against an enemy they had never met. There will always be a debate on whether the Indian contribution to World War I strengthened England's colonial grip and postponed an inevitable independence, but that does not take away anything from the amazing contribution of the soldiers who bravely fought in the deceptively welcoming fields of Flanders and the burning heat of Mesopotamia.

On the centenary of the First War, two books have gone deep into the fascinating Indian military role that can barely be imagined now. The entire strength of the present Indian Army and more would be needed to match the 1.38 million-strong force that left the shores of the country a century ago. Vedica Kant's If I die here, who will remember me?: India and the First World War goes into the narrative of the war from the political motivation to the challenges faced by Indian soldiers.

But where it is most engrossing is in the way it has captured the life of the soldier, from the culture shock he got in Europe to his questioning of the racial hierarchies in colonial rule. Peppered with rare photographs of troops engaged in things as mundane as preparing food to a trench deployment and the deeply moving picture of an Indian prisoner of war in a camp in Wunstorf that is also mentioned by writer Amitav Ghosh in the foreword, Kant's book captures the life, the battles and even the loves of the Indian soldier.

The book that goes into the precise military details of the battle, reconstructing the action of the seven Expeditionary Forces that went into several theatres of war between 1914 and '18, is Amarinder Singh's Honour and Fidelity: India's Military Contribution to the Great War. The soldier-politician has dug deep into his family records, official documents and the immaculately maintained records of the regiments that went to war. For the military enthusiast, the book contains delicious details, such as the cunning move by Naik Ayub Khan of the 129 Baluch Regiment to reach a particularly difficult German trench, claiming to be a deserter who can get more men to cross over and gathering vital defence informa-tion in the bargain for his battalion.

Singh's book brings out the massive military contribution of Indian soldiers and how it changed the tide of the war for the Brit-ish who were struggling in France with its British Expeditionary Force (BEF). It was on the verge of collapse before being propped up by the Indian Corps.

The four years of battle cost 74,000 Indian lives. Singh says that he decided to write the book after he got livid over how little the Indian con-tribution was acknowledged. "In a 12-part series that the BBC did on the war a few years ago, India's contribution was found fit to be shown for only one minute. One minute in 23 and a half hours of programming!" he says.

Kant's book will appeal both to a first-time reader of the war as well as a battle fanatic as it comes up with surprises every few pages. One such is a two-page section called 'Sex and Romance in France' that speaks of the fleeting, sometimes transactional, relationships that Indian soldiers had with French women.

Mahomed Khan, a trooper from the 6th Cavalry, married a Frenchwoman despite apprehensions from his family back home. He eventually told them that the king had ordered him to marry.

Kant also captures the astonishing tale of the Mir brothers. While Mir Dast was the recipient of a Victoria Cross for gallant action during a gas attack, his brother Mir Mast deserted and went to the Germans with 24 others to undertake anti-British activities. Another section on religious imagery in the war reveals how Indian soldiers described the battles they fought in letters back home with religious references from the Mahabharat as well as the Quran.

Kant's book has liberally used first-hand accounts of the war-from letters sent by soldiers to archives and POW camp records-to reveal the minds of the men who faced extraordinary challenges, even beyond the primary task of war fighting.

However, for the gritty details of fighting from tactics to innovations in the battlefield and inspiring leadership-Singh's book is unbeatable. The politician has always had a soldier in him and like his previous accounts of war-from the Kargil war to the three battles of India since Independence-he proves his credentials as one of the country's finest military writers. The painstaking details through which he chronicles the actions of the forgotten men stand out and are a befitting tribute to their contribution. From France to East Africa, Mesopotamia, Palestine and Gallipoli, the battlefields come alive. For instance, the description of the battle against the Turkish forces at Kut in Mesopotamia is beefed up with sketches and a blow-by-blow account. One particular day, Singh writes, of the 255 Indian officers who went to battle, 111 became casualties.

It is interesting to note that the two very different books on the war at one point were meant to be one consolidated work. Singh says that initially the plan was to bring together a single narrative along with Kant, but the project became unwieldy. The reader has a choice-to pick one or the other. But to fully relive the experience of a war fought a century ago, both books are a must-read.