This week's "Poke Me", invites your comments on 'Is it fine to forget our World War I heroes?'. The feature will be reproduced on the edit page of the Saturday edition of the newspaper with a pick of readers' best comments.
So be poked and fire in your comments to us right away. Comments reproduced in the paper will be the ones that support or oppose the views expressed here intelligently. Feel free to add reference links etc, in support of your comments.
Mrinal Pande
Prior to the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I being commemorated across Europe and Britain last weekend, the rather grandiose-sounding Global Organisation for People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) asked, “How come we have almost forgotten the 1.3 million Indians who fought in the First World War a hundred years ago?” Why, they wondered, has India forgotten to honour those Indian soldiers who fought against fascist forces on behalf of ‘civilisation’? In March 1915 alone, some 5,000 Indian soldiers died during one of the bloodiest battles in Neuve Chapelle in France. Where are their memorials in India?
The war that the GOPIO wishes to commemorate this Independence Day was a war in which millions of civilians across the world struggled to survive. Many did this by running away to safer lands, digging up trenches in bleak landscapes and bunkers in their own backyards, hoarding food, essentials and weapons they could get their hands on and then hunkering down.
The venerable NRIs seem somewhat ashamed of India’s partial amnesia of its noble role in the First World War. What they prefer to leave out is how ‘The Great War’ sucked up nation after nation as it spread and then proceeded to smash its colonial rifle butts on the doors of countries ruled by the Allies.
Britain recruited millions from the colonies of the British Empire and marched them off to alien lands without so much as by your leave. Most of these soldiers from all across India were rushed off, unequipped with suitable military gear or weaponry and became little more than cannon fodder especially in the winter months in foreign lands. These men died defending a country they knew nothing about. At the same time, millions of civilians in India also paid a heavy price in terms of man-made famines, food shortages, blackouts and bombings for a war and ideology that had nothing to do with them.
A quarter of a century after the end of World War I, Indian soldiers once again fought under the flag of the British Empire. As Madhusree Mukerjee tellingly reveals in her book, Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India, a series of decisions directly taken by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill between 1939 and 1944 resulted in the deaths of some 4 million Indians. In response to an urgent plea from the Indian secretary of state for emergency shipments of food, Churchill had responded with a telegram asking why, if food was so scarce, “Gandhi hadn’t died yet”.
The Great Bengal Famine of 1942-43 was a direct result of Britain diverting food grain from India to Britain, contributing to a massive food shortage in the areas comprising present-day West Bengal, Bangladesh, Odisha and Bihar. As Mukerjee quotes Field Marshall Archibald Wavell, who would go on to become the new viceroy of India, “Winston may be right in saying that the starvation of anyhow under-fed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks, but he makes no sufficient allowance for the sense of Empire responsibility in this country." This was one of the consequences of World War II for India, which sent its men to fight a “good war”.
With the end of World War II in 1945, events in India dovetailed into a blood-bathed Partition of India in 1947. The partition of the country that affected millions was a large part of the price we paid, we were told, for our freedom. People who lived through any of these climacteric events are different from those who didn’t. A common language to describe what our parents’ and grand-parents’ generations saw and heard and experienced in 1947 is still hard to come by.
The very real ‘wars’ that Indians experienced in the run-up to Independence and in its aftermath are neither things to celebrate nor to sentimentalise. Complex psycho-nationalistic reasons ensure that a drastic gap remains between these wars as described in our textbooks and popular historiography and as they really happened and were experienced. Depicting patriotic heroes who fought “as long as they could only to smilingly lay down their lives” is all very fine. But what really took place, under what conditions, not to mention the grave errors of judgement that killed these patriots, are left unsaid beyond the closed ramparts of academia.
Do we wish to only remember and glorify our soldiers bathed in hues of the patrician, Art-Deco civility that the British left behind in 1947?
All this talk of “bloody sacrifices” and national pride and glory of wars waged by “our bravehearts” lack one thing: understanding the impact of the two World Wars on India. Without knowing who they were defending, who they were defending against, and why they were defending the very people against whom India was conducting a nationwide struggle for independence, all this talk of celebrating India’s national history, historical rights and making plans for war memorials to commemorate those who died as conscripts in far and foreign lands makes little sense.
Mrinal Pande is a senior journalist and author
So be poked and fire in your comments to us right away. Comments reproduced in the paper will be the ones that support or oppose the views expressed here intelligently. Feel free to add reference links etc, in support of your comments.
Mrinal Pande
Prior to the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I being commemorated across Europe and Britain last weekend, the rather grandiose-sounding Global Organisation for People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) asked, “How come we have almost forgotten the 1.3 million Indians who fought in the First World War a hundred years ago?” Why, they wondered, has India forgotten to honour those Indian soldiers who fought against fascist forces on behalf of ‘civilisation’? In March 1915 alone, some 5,000 Indian soldiers died during one of the bloodiest battles in Neuve Chapelle in France. Where are their memorials in India?
The war that the GOPIO wishes to commemorate this Independence Day was a war in which millions of civilians across the world struggled to survive. Many did this by running away to safer lands, digging up trenches in bleak landscapes and bunkers in their own backyards, hoarding food, essentials and weapons they could get their hands on and then hunkering down.
The venerable NRIs seem somewhat ashamed of India’s partial amnesia of its noble role in the First World War. What they prefer to leave out is how ‘The Great War’ sucked up nation after nation as it spread and then proceeded to smash its colonial rifle butts on the doors of countries ruled by the Allies.
Britain recruited millions from the colonies of the British Empire and marched them off to alien lands without so much as by your leave. Most of these soldiers from all across India were rushed off, unequipped with suitable military gear or weaponry and became little more than cannon fodder especially in the winter months in foreign lands. These men died defending a country they knew nothing about. At the same time, millions of civilians in India also paid a heavy price in terms of man-made famines, food shortages, blackouts and bombings for a war and ideology that had nothing to do with them.
A quarter of a century after the end of World War I, Indian soldiers once again fought under the flag of the British Empire. As Madhusree Mukerjee tellingly reveals in her book, Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India, a series of decisions directly taken by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill between 1939 and 1944 resulted in the deaths of some 4 million Indians. In response to an urgent plea from the Indian secretary of state for emergency shipments of food, Churchill had responded with a telegram asking why, if food was so scarce, “Gandhi hadn’t died yet”.
The Great Bengal Famine of 1942-43 was a direct result of Britain diverting food grain from India to Britain, contributing to a massive food shortage in the areas comprising present-day West Bengal, Bangladesh, Odisha and Bihar. As Mukerjee quotes Field Marshall Archibald Wavell, who would go on to become the new viceroy of India, “Winston may be right in saying that the starvation of anyhow under-fed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks, but he makes no sufficient allowance for the sense of Empire responsibility in this country." This was one of the consequences of World War II for India, which sent its men to fight a “good war”.
With the end of World War II in 1945, events in India dovetailed into a blood-bathed Partition of India in 1947. The partition of the country that affected millions was a large part of the price we paid, we were told, for our freedom. People who lived through any of these climacteric events are different from those who didn’t. A common language to describe what our parents’ and grand-parents’ generations saw and heard and experienced in 1947 is still hard to come by.
The very real ‘wars’ that Indians experienced in the run-up to Independence and in its aftermath are neither things to celebrate nor to sentimentalise. Complex psycho-nationalistic reasons ensure that a drastic gap remains between these wars as described in our textbooks and popular historiography and as they really happened and were experienced. Depicting patriotic heroes who fought “as long as they could only to smilingly lay down their lives” is all very fine. But what really took place, under what conditions, not to mention the grave errors of judgement that killed these patriots, are left unsaid beyond the closed ramparts of academia.
Do we wish to only remember and glorify our soldiers bathed in hues of the patrician, Art-Deco civility that the British left behind in 1947?
All this talk of “bloody sacrifices” and national pride and glory of wars waged by “our bravehearts” lack one thing: understanding the impact of the two World Wars on India. Without knowing who they were defending, who they were defending against, and why they were defending the very people against whom India was conducting a nationwide struggle for independence, all this talk of celebrating India’s national history, historical rights and making plans for war memorials to commemorate those who died as conscripts in far and foreign lands makes little sense.
Mrinal Pande is a senior journalist and author
( Originally published on Aug 06, 2014 )
