India Empire and First World War Culture

Based on ten years of research Santanu Das''s India Empire and First World War Culture: Writings Images and Songs recovers the sensuous experience of combatants non-combatants and civilians from undivided India in the 19141918 conflict and their socio-cultural visual and literary worlds. Around 1.5 million Indians were recruited of whom over a million served abroad. Das draws on a variety of fresh unusual sources - objects images rumours streetpamphlets letters diaries sound-recordings folksongs testimonies poetry essays and fiction - to produce the first cultural and literary history moving from recruitment tactics in villages through sepoy traces and feelings in battlefields hospitals and POW camps to post-war reflections on Europe and empire. Combining archival excavation in different countries across several continents with investigative readings of Gandhi Kipling Iqbal Naidu Nazrul Tagore and Anand this imaginative study opens up the worlds of sepoys and labourers men and women nationalists artists and intellectuals trying to make sense of home and the world in times of war.