World War 1: India’s forgotten war

It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon in New Delhi. Friends and families, tourists and day trippers, stand in front of the huge stone arch of India Gate having their pictures taken. There’s a carnival atmosphere as thousands of picnickers relax in the park enjoying this magnificent monument. But my visit here is not as a tourist. It’s for a BBC World Service radio documentary about The First World War, a brutal global conflict which broke out a hundred years ago.

India Gate was designed by British architect Edwin Lutyens, and unveiled in 1931 to commemorate some 70,000 men from pre-partition India who lost their lives in World War I. As a child of Punjabi migrants to England, I used to visit the site with my own family, and I remember having my photo taken here with a soldier. Although I knew the monument was significant, I didn’t know then why it had been built, and a quick poll on this sunny afternoon reveals a similar response. Since 1971 the perpetual flame of Amar Jawan Jyoti has marked India Gate as the official tomb of the unknown soldier, so perhaps it’s not surprising that each person I ask names a different conflict in which Indian soldiers have fought. No one except a man selling souvenir postcards mentions The First World War.

Military historian Rana Chhina from the Centre for Armed Forces Historical Research in Delhi explained the reason he thinks there has been so little memory of the First World War in India. “As a nation we have no memories of any conflict before 1947. These are forgotten histories,” he said. “Anything prior to Independence was seen as colonial history, not anything that the Indian State needed to engage with.” But Chhina believes “that view is changing now and we have matured sufficiently as a nation to come out of the colonial past, to reclaim some of these histories”.

Dr Santanu Das from Kings College in London is writing a book about the First World War and India. He explained how when war broke out on August 4, 1914, between Germany and the Allied Forces of France and Britain, “India immediately is co-opted into the war. India joins the war as part of the British Empire and none of the Indian politicians were even consulted. King George V, he issues this proclamation To The People and Princes of my Indian Empire, asking them to help”. 

Perhaps, most surprising for us today is how the Indian political elite, and even nationalists, gave their wholehearted support to the British Raj during the war years. Gandhi even led a massive recruitment drive encouraging towns and villages to send more men. But, according to Dr Das, this was always with the thought that, “India will give its men, its money its horses, its munitions, in return for greater political autonomy”. Once the war ended, they hoped, India would have a greater control over its political future.

The men who joined as soldiers included a mix of the pre-existing Indian Army and Imperial Service Troops, which served the semi-autonomous princely states. Most were recruited according to a theory of so-called ‘martial races’, what Das calls a form of ‘social Darwinism’, in which the British tapped into a pre-existing idea in India that ‘some people were seen as being naturally more war-like’. Most of these men were from the North of India, and the basic army salary of eleven rupees a month could be a tempting prospect for many who were poor farmers.

Retired colonel Baljit Singh Joon told me how both his grandfathers were recruited from a small farming village in Haryana, then part of Punjab. “Before the war they were working on agricultural activities and cattle rearing,” he said, “then they read in a local newspaper, you must join the war.” There were 400 men from this village who went to fight, from a total population of only around two thousand. “Very few people remained in the village,” Joon told me. “All the burden of agriculture, farming and cattle-rearing came on the shoulders of ladies and elderly people.”

Around 622,000 soldiers, and 470,000 non-combatants, were sent overseas from India, and around one and a half million were recruited during the war years. But not everyone signed up willingly. Professor Yadav from the Haryana Academy of History and Culture has discovered instances where local leaders ‘stopped the water of those who were not readily coming forward to join the army and rewarded people who were joining.’ Brutal methods such as ‘stripping people naked and making them stand before their women folk,’ were also used, and according to Professor Yadav, “people were kept in thorny bushes for hours and hours, and unless they said yes, I’m ready for enlistment they were not let out”.

When an Armistice was declared on November 11, 1918, mass recruitment in India ended. It’s hardly surprising, given what came next in the country’s history, that the Independence movement became the dominant narrative. But the war did have an impact here.

Of the men who left from Baljit Singh Joon’s family village only half returned. His grandfather, Gurdayal Singh, came back to his wife after years away to find the village badly affected by famine and drought. Joon’s other grandfather never made it home at all.

The author is with the BBC World Service