The Coolie’s Great War : Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-1921

By Radhika Singha

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About the book

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 removed the wounded from the battlefield, Radhika Singha recovers the story of this unacknowledged service.

The labour regimes built on the backs of these ‘coolies’ sustained the military infrastructure of empire; their deployment in interregional arenas bent to the demands of global war. Viewed as racially subordinate and subject to ‘non-martial’ caste designations, they fought back against their status, using the warring powers’ need for manpower as leverage to challenge traditional service hierarchies and wage differentials.

The Coolie’s Great War views that global conflict 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.

Pages: 396

Available in: Hardback

Language: English

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.

Retrieving the forgotten category of Indian menial labourers in the Great War, this magisterial study explores their fate in local and global sites, from pre-War conflict zones to post-War demobilisation, pulling together military, legal, labour and migration histories in a narrative that is as complex as it is compelling. - Tanika Sarkar, Retired Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Consolidating a decade of pioneering research, this is a book of rare scholarship and imagination. Combining extraordinary archival work with intricate attention to multiple historical frameworks, it recovers the minutiae of the “coolie” world to reconceptualise—quietly yet radically—the “global” history of the War. - Santanu Das, Professor of Modern Literature and Culture, All Souls College, University of Oxford

Among the recent bumper crop of World War studies, this magisterial work stands out. By examining the history of war as a history of work, Singha reveals the potency of global war as a catalyst of societal transformation in South Asia. - Ravi Ahuja, Professor of Modern Indian History, Georg-August University of Göttingen

This important work illuminates a little-known and fascinating aspect of the Indian experience of the First World War. It reveals insights not only into British imperial policy and the British Indian military, but also into Indian society and its development in the first part of the twentieth century. - Anatol Lieven, Professor, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University in Qatar