Short notes on the Great War

The Great War’s lasting literary legacy belongs to the genre we now call ‘Great War novels’. The trickle of novels started early—Ian Hay’s The First Hundred Thousand (1914) and Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire (Le Feu, 1916). It has as its companions in harsh realism Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel (1920) and Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929). In 1923 appeared Jaroslav Hasek’s Czech classic The Good Soldier Schweik. But 1929 was the ‘annus mirabilis’: Robert Graves’s Goodbye To All That, Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War, Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Richard Aldington’s Death Of A Hero, Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms, and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Yet, it didn’t stop there. Succeeding generations added  Great War novels to the canon. Thus John Harris, Derek Robinson and William Leonard Marshall are joined by Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker in our own time.

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‘When the war is over, many qissas (stories) will be produced,’ observed Sib Singh, an Indian prisoner of war, held in the Halfmoon camp just outside Berlin on December 9, 1916. It is indeed a paradox that the War, that resulted in such unprecedented destruction, would produce such a remarkable flowering of literary creativity. A hundred years on, First World War literature, historians despair, has hijacked the mem­ory of the War. For generations of school-kids across the English-speaking world, the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon—like Carol Ann Duffy’s The Last Post—has evolved, beyond literary memory and cultural history, into a structure of feeling. Of all the colonies in the British, French and German empires, India contributed the highest number of men: the updated estimates being about 1.7 million, over half of them combatants, who served overseas during the War. What impact did the War have on the writing of the time in India? Where is the Indian literature of the First World War?

Our poets From left, Tagore was a favourite poet of Owen; Kazi Nazrul Islam, the ‘warrior poet’; Sarojini Naidu

The main stumbling block towards recovering Indian war literature is that most of these sepoys—recruited from northern India in accordance with the theory of the ‘martial races’—were semi-literate or non-literate and thus did not leave behind the abundance of poems, diaries, memoirs, novels and short stories that form the cornerstone of European war memory. But non-literate does not mean being non-literary. In the censored extracts from the letters of these sepoys, there often occur verses, originally written in different regional languages such as Urdu, Pashto, Gurmukhi, Gorkhali and Hindi, but now surviving only in Eng­lish translations. For chief censor E.B. Howell, such verses were a sure sign of the weakening morale among the troops. These verses—often existing ones adapted to the stories of the present war—were possibly dictated by sepoys to scribes; they point to the rich oral traditions of the regions from where these men came. For example, in the then undivided Punjab—from where more than half of the combatants were recrui­ted—war verses circulated, ranging from recruitment num­bers extolling the justness of ‘George Pancham’ (George V) and denouncing Germany to ironic pieces where the global conflict is domesticated into festive, familial frivolity, lacing native playfulness with scathing critique:

“Holi brought youth in the old age, Mr Seth is playing Holi with
Mrs Seth
Why should the nephew not be shocked, seeing Uncle play Holi with Aunty!|
Springs of blood are flowing in Europe, in what new colours has arrived the old Holi!”

There also exists a rich repertoire of folksongs—of lament and mourning—sung by Punjabi women when their men went away to battle; some of them survive even today, transmitted orally across intervening generations.

The only major Indian literary figure who was directly involved in the war effort was the Bengali/Bangladeshi revolutionary poet, Kazi Nazrul Islam. Dissident, reckless and startlingly original, he volunteered for the 49th Bengali Regiment and, though he was never mobilised, underwent military training for the duration of the war. What is remarkable about Nazrul’s war writings—which include an epistolary novel, a series of short stories and some poems—is the way the First World War gets fused with other events such as the October Revolution, the Turkish War of independence, the Third Afghan War and the Indian nationalist struggle to form a vision of revolutionary violence, incandescent with terrible beauty. Consider his iconic poem, Bidrohi (The Rebel), written in 1922:

I trample on bonds,
obey no law,
recognise no rule.
I sport with loaded boats
In my revels
And send them down to the sea’s bottom
Without mercy.
I’m a torpedo
An explosive mine.
I am the Spirit of Shiva, the destroyer.
I am the summer’s storms
Always seething with turbulence,
I am the wild wind:
I crush and sweep away all in my path. (translated by Rafiqul Islam)

In India during the war years, stories of the German cruiser Emden torpedoing boats in the Indian Ocean created widespread panic. It is both extraordinary and typical of Nazrul that images of boats, torpedoes, mines and ‘subterranean volcanoes’ and a more general aesthetics of violence are mined out of an imperial war and pressed by the sepoy-turned-rebel into the service of revolutionary nationalism.

Their war From left, Kipling lost a son in the War; some of Hardy’s poems sensed its coming; Eliot wrote The Waste Land

War literature was by no means produced just by combatants. In Britain, some of the most powerful writing came from civilians and women, such as the war poems of Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, or the war-haunted modernist classics like Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. Similarly, some of the first war poems to appear from India were from none other than Rabindranath Tagore, perhaps the most feted poet in the world at the time—Owen carried a copy of Gitanjali in his pocket in the trenches. His poem The Trumpet was published in 1914 in The Times, alongside that of Kipling and Laurence Binyon, for purposes of imperial propaganda. However, Tagore was to revise his attitude dramatically as the war progressed and his mat­­ure responses to the War can be found in the remarkable Essays on Nationalism that he delivered as lectures in Japan and the US, and which was published in 1917. The amount of Indian war writing by civilians is remarkably varied and powerful, ranging from the Bengali recruitment play Bengali Paltan, which was played to packed audiences in Calcutta in 1917 to sub-Tennysonian lyrics commemorating the Indian war effort, as in Sarojini Naidu’s The Gift of India:

Gathered like pearls in their
alien graves,
Silent they sleep by the Persian waves.
Scattered like shells on Egyptian sands
They lie with pale brows and brave, broken hands.
They are strewn like blossoms mown down by chance
On the blood-brown meadows of Flanders and France.

Then there are two remarkable memoirs written in Bengali: Kalyan Pradeep (1928) by Mokkhada Devi, about her gra­ndson Kalyan Mukherjee, who served as a doctor and perished in Mesopotamia, and Abhi Le Baghdad by Sisir Kumar Sar­badhikari, who served as a medical orderly and was taken prisoner in Mes­opotamia, and survived the war. There are also short stories, poems, folksongs and memoirs in various regional languages, which we have just started to uncover, particularly in Punjab, Haryana, Bengal, Mizoram and Nepal.

The literary work in which the world of the sepoys finds its fullest expression is Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Across the Black Waters (1939). Anand straddled both British and Indian modernism, working for some time as the private secretary to T.S. Eliot and hovering on the fringes of the Bloomsbury group. More importantly, he grew up in Punjab and belonged to the same agricultural-martial community from where the sepoys came. Across the Black Waters is dedicated ‘to the memory of my father Subedar Lal Chand Anand, M.S.M, (late 2/17th Dogra)’, who worked as a clerk for the British Indian army. The middle part of the ‘Lalu trilogy’—named after the protagonist who is a sensitive village youth—the novel opens up a new world in war fiction in English, as we see Lalu and his fellow-sepoys from the Punjab landing in Marseilles and negotiating Western culture for the first time—including a visit to a pub and a brothel—before they are pushed into the trenches: the history of a small village in South Asia is aligned to the defining event of 20th century Europe. Written on the eve of the Second World War as the colonies were called upon to serve again, the novel is a challenge to the very ‘whi­teness’ of war memory and a vital act of recovery of the Indian war experience. The 69th Rifles in the novel is mod­elled after the 57th Wilde’s Rifles. However, what makes the novel remarkable is not historical fidelity, but Anand’s intimate evocation of sepoys’ lives in France:

Abhi le Baghdad; Across the Black Waters

“Habitual early risers, most of the sepoys were hurrying about, unpacking luggage, polishing boots, belts and brass buttons with their spittle, washing their faces, cleaning their teeth with the chewing-sticks which they had brought from home, and gargling with thunderous noises and frightening reverberations, to the tunes of hymns, chants and the names of gods, more profuse and long-winded, because the cold air went creeping into their flesh. ... ‘Ohe, where are you going?’ Uncle Kirpu shouted. Lalu rushed in, put on his boots quickly, adjusted his turban and walked out again. ‘The boy has gone mad!’ exclaimed Kirpu to Dhanoo.”

If Siegfried Sassoon, in The Diary of an Infantry Officer, had reduced the sepoy to a blob of brown and red, here touch, taste, feeling and sound evoke the body of the sepoy as a sensorium rather than a photograph or object. Camaraderie here is not formed through the homoerotic intensity of Owen, but forged over the chewing stick brought from home or through the familial greeting ‘Ohe’, as Anand refashions language as emotional resonance rather than just verbal communication. The war becomes a site of politicisation for Lalu, as he begins to question both colonial knowledge and racist hierarchies. Anand’s novel is not an aria for the death of the high European bourgeois consciousness, but rather finds a voice and political consciousness for the working-class sepoy as he encounters Europe, war and desolation.

As we embark on the first of the four commemorative years to mark the Great War’s centenary, there is a swell of interest across the world in Indian war experience and literature. Diff­erent kinds of war literature are being freshly unearthed from various parts of India in regional languages. The next few years will hopefully see this process of excavation gather form and pace: we need to read the literature alongside other kinds of testimonial documents and photographs and artefacts to provide us with a fuller understanding of how the War affected India—its people, its politics as well as its literature.

Santanu Das teaches at King’s College, London. He has authored Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature, and edited Race, Empire and First World War Writing

From : Out Look March 31, 2014