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Books

Brilliant INDIA, EMPIRE & FIRST WORLD of Rabindranath Tagore,
a story by his elder sibling
alternative WAR CULTURE: WRITINGS, Swarnakumari Devi and
IMAGES & SONGS
the lyric poetry of Saro-
history Santanu Das jini Naidu. This literature
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
highlights the contradic-
Rs.1,774 Pages 466 tions, complexities and
INNER OF The ideological challenges
Hindu literary that impacted elite and
Wprize (2019) in middle-class national
the non-fiction category, newspapers that actively This history consciousness in British
this history of the First contributed to multivalent highlights loss and India. Several Hindi and
World War and India war-time discourses in mourning, anger and Urdu language narratives
is a deeply researched, British India. pride, patriotism and upended traditional qissa
well-structured retrieval The war zones as nationalism in India and fasana literature to
of unconventional archival reconstructed in this book during World War I create a new genre of his-
material that revolution- range over the “farthest torical fiction.
ises ways of understand- fields” of the European/ The war also inspired
ing transnational human Western and Middle tacles of Private J.N. or soldier and rebel poets
and cultural negotiations Eastern theatres in which ‘Jon’ Sen, the only Indian such as Kazi Nazrul Islam
during the Great War Indian sepoys, primar- in the West Yorkshire whose evocative “aesthet-
1914-1918. Santanu Das, ily peasants, as well as Regiment, preserved in the ics of violence” changed
professor of literature and educated, middle-class Dupleix Museum in Chan- the contours of poetry and
culture at Oxford Universi- professionals, fought dernagore (an erstwhile created new idioms and
ty, takes the reader beyond bloody battles for imperial French enclave in British metaphors that attracted a
official records and sta- Great Britain. Paradoxi- India); a poignant letter huge youth following. Mu-
tistics, traditional sources cally, the battlefront was a written by a young village hammad Iqbal, Aurobindo
of war history, and ferrets democratic space in which girl Kishen Devi who had Ghose and Mulk Raj
out facts and anecdotes racially and socially dis- learnt to read and write so Anand (Across the Black
of the Great War that he criminatory codes of civil- she could correspond with Waters, 1940) are also
describes as “artefacts in ian life were buried under her father Hamilcar Sewa brought within the ambit
the wardrobe”. the rhetoric of patriotism, Singh serving in Egypt; of this alternative narra-
Over the past few years, sacrifice, self- discipline the trench notebook of tive. By asking pertinent
there’s been revived inter- and masculinity. Jemadar Mir Mast who questions about not just
est in WWI in which the Das documents the influenced by the Turko- the contribution of Indian
major role played by over trajectory of swaraj or German jihadi mission, sepoys to the history of
a million Indian sepoys/ the self-rule movement defected to the Germans pre-independent India but
soldiers was routinely subtly dovetailing the and eventually found his also about their post-war
blanked out by Western modest benefits derived way home via Kabul — are lives, the author questions
historians. The Great War by impoverished peasants a few of several artefacts, the equation between
divided Indian opinion from across the subcon- bearing testimony of nationalist politics and
with imperial loyalty tinent who enlisted in Indian involvement in the radicalisation of Indian
clashing with rising na- British armies in Europe Great War. The author soldiers in trenches of the
tionalist sentiment. and elsewhere. The com- believes such off-beat Western Front and POW
Das has analysed loyal- batants were Sikhs from histories “occupy a strange camps in Germany.
ist speeches of Mohandas Punjab, Gurkhas from space between life-writing, In this oeuvre which
Karamchand Gandhi, the Nepal and Pathans from travel-writing and war- showcases the author’s in-
nationalist writings of the rugged terrains of the writing: one never knows tensive research capability
Lokmanya Tilak, a popular North West. The non- where one ends and the and academic rigour, Das
Bengali recruitment play combatants were mainly other begins”. draws meaning from the
enacted in public theatres, qualified physicians from How did creative litera- most modest artefacts and
and fawning supplications Bengal. ture of that era shape pub- trivial everyday realities of
of native princes. Addi- The array of images lic opinion and discourses life in early 20th cen-
tionally there are reports reproduced in the book — regarding the War? This is tury war-time India. The
of debates in Punjab the bloodstained spec- to be found in the poetry mass exodus of over one

92 EDUCATIONWORLD APRIL 2020