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- Acknowledging The Coolie’s Great War | EXTRACT
Acknowledging The Coolie’s Great War | EXTRACT
The Coolie’s Great War views World War I through the lens of Indian labour, constructing a distinct geography of the war-from tribal settlements and colonial jails, beyond India’s frontiers, to the battlefronts of France and Mesopotamia.
Read this extract to get a glimpse of the underestimated Indian contribution to that historical global conflict:
Battlefield Salvage: The Plentitude and Waste of the ‘European Great War’
From the spring of 1917, as the German submarine blockade began to make itself felt, salvage activity rose in importance. In July 1917 a Controller of Salvage was appointed, and fifteen Indian labour companies were allocated to battlefield clearance in the Third Army area. Side by side with officially prescribed salvage work, soldiers of all ranks and nationalities searched for material to supplement food, fuel, clothing, and shelter, or to shape into souvenirs to be sold, exchanged, or gifted. British officers of the Indian Army prided themselves on ‘resourceful’ Pashtun orderlies, or batmen (soldier- servants), said to display a special talent for extending regimental comforts. Race and rank determined whether acts of appropriation were categorised as amusing examples of pilferage, souvenir collection, loot, theft, or barbarity.
But because they worked upon the environments in which they were positioned, Indian labourers developed a particularly intimate relationship with natural and material resources, and landscapes of devastation could soften sometimes to take on other meanings.
An Indian cavalryman posted as NCO with a Lushai labour company complained bitterly about conditions, which were very different from those he had come to expect as his due in France. They were five miles from the nearest village. They never saw a newspaper and had no recreation. There was no medical care, so twenty men had come down with mumps, and yet there was no separation of the sick. ‘The men are utterly filthy and take no care of their health.’ And yet this was probably the very same site of which Sainghinga would recall that ‘[w]e had good times together.’ His memoir describes how the 26th and 29th Lushai companies positioned at the ruins of Monchy-au-Bois used salvage material to create spaces and activities they could claim as their own. Sainghinga relates the men’s rising apprehension as their train moved through ever more shattered landscapes towards the frontline, then the joy of waking up after the first night to discover an abandoned field with a growth of greens, something they missed terribly in their meals in France. Their first act of salvage was to create a sense of ‘home’ by boiling up a pot. Well before the YMCA organised any recreation, the Lushais made their own arrangements:
We looked around and collected corrugated iron sheets and other things, and we built a big recreation hall. The other room was made into a canteen. We pooled our money to buy and sell all kinds of things. The canteen began to make a profit. We bought a bioscope. Since many of us had not seen ‘moving pictures’ it brought us much joy. The recreation hall was used as a fellowship hall on Sundays.
The tents of the 41st, 42nd, and 43rd Ranchi Company were pitched on both banks of the Ancre valley, an area that had been wrested back after prolonged German occupation with enormous loss of life on both sides. Father Ory wrote of the ghastly scenes the men encountered as they stripped down dug-outs and filled in shell holes:
every five yards we come across bones still wrapped up in their putties, arms and legs blown off by shell-fire. One of our old Ranchi boys had his heart full and stood by weeping … The Park of Thiepval is littered with human remains … British and German helmets lie in heaps.
And yet the same men shed in flooded shell holes along the Ancre river, hunted down hares startled from the high grass by heavy shelling, and returned to camp decked out in odds and ends that had been abandoned on battlefields:
German helmets have taken a hold on their fancy, when the steel pike has been knocked off, they stick field flowers in the hole. What with the airman’s fur headgear and the Pomeranian blue ribboned cap, they make a most successful parody of the mighty War Lord’s noble army.
Other articles, ‘eloquent if malodorous evidence of the life-and-death struggle’ in which they had figured, found their way into the kit of coloured labourers—for instance, military coats found un t for combatant use, which were dyed grey or black and kept for labourers or for prisoners of war. Men craved cigarette holders and pipes to smoke their allowance of ‘ration’ cigarettes and loose tobacco. But the debris that surrounded them and that they worked upon could also be lethal, though there was a tendency to attribute ‘accidents’ to the naïveté of illiterate personnel. When a man trying to make a cigarette holder out of a detonator had his hands ripped open, Father Ory concluded that this ‘slight accident’ would work as a warning, ‘as it is in their nature to take lessons from experience alone.’ However, even he had to admit that no human prudence could really keep the men safe from the unexploded bombs lurking everywhere around their worksites.
Sainghinga recalled how they had also been cautioned not to eat the tinned beef, soda water, and sweets they found in German trenches, lest these had been poisoned. The Ranchi companies had set out eagerly for the ‘hidden treasures and fairy-like surprises’ of German dugouts in Rossignol Wood. One Johan, opening what he thought was a brandy bottle, uncorked a tear gas bomb. In this glimmer of riches found in trenches we get a sense of how men, for whom want and making do were so much a part of everyday existence, experienced the plentitude and waste of the ‘European Great War’. In his ethnography of the Lhota Nagas, J. P. Mills remarked in passing that ‘[t]he men who went to France with the Naga Corps thought our method of cleaning an animal and throwing away the o al most wasteful.’
Ro read more, order your copy of The Coolie’s Great War today!
About the Book - The Coolie's Great War
Though largely invisible in histories of the First World War, over 5,50,000 men in the ranks of the Indian army were non-combatants. From the porters, stevedores and construction workers in the Coolie Corps to those who maintained supply lines and…
About the Author - Radhika Singha
Radhika Singha is Professor of Modern Indian History at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research interests focus on the social history of crime and criminal law, identification practices, governmentality, borders and border-crossing.
To read more, order your copy of The Coolie's Great War, by Radhika Singha today!
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