BENGALURU : The author of The Coolie’s Great War (HarperCollins, `699), Radhika Singha talks about the stories of the unacknowledged Indian labourers who helped keep the Allied supply lines flowing during World War-I. Excerpts from an interview:
What made you explore this subject?
Basantu Ram Chacha, the household cook and my third parent, came from Kasauli and he would tell me about the life he once enjoyed as servant to a British army officer. Perhaps it was the warmth and love he brought to my childhood which drew me to the world of the ‘menial servants’ in the ranks of the Indian Army. My childhood was also populated by cousins who were ‘army brats’ and by aunts who sat by the radio when there were wars.
This left me with the feeling that the lives of fellow citizens in the defence forces are often squandered in the pursuit of vainglorious exercises. What are the purposes to which the army can be deployed? This is something that politically minded Indians began to think about in 1919-25. They thought about it again in 2003-2004, when many protested against proposals to send a large Indian contingent to support the American invasion of Iraq.
It was this conjuncture which made me want to understand that earlier moment in 1914 when Indian troops sailed into the Persian Gulf to secure the oil fields of Abadan and to draw the Ottoman vilayat of Basra into the fold of British empire. What I discovered at the National Archives of Delhi was a frantic correspondence in 1916 from the British military command in Mesopotamia (Iraq) demanding not only additional Indian troops but also latrine cleaners, dhobis, boatmen, and port labour and construction workers from India.
What are some memorable stories you came across?
Non-combatants, assigned to a lower status, wage and benefits structure in the army, began to demand equivalence, or near equivalence with combatants in interesting ways. Such was the need for follower labour that their actions did not always invite harsh retribution.
This was the case when 94 Gurkha stretcher bearers at Peshawar demanded the same free rations as soldiers, deposited their kit at the guardhouse and began to march away home down the Nowshera road. In France, it was assumed that the men of the ‘tribal’ labour companies would accept just about any kind of flesh, but they refused to eat horse-meat and demanded the same meat as Europeans.
Did you get a chance to meet family members who shared their stories for the book?
A wonderful discovery for me were letters published by two Belgian Jesuit fathers of their experiences in France with two labour companies recruited from Chhota Nagpur. In the hill regions of Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya, the public has a deep interest in the history of the labour companies they sent to France, and have kept the internet well supplied with stories.
However, labour companies from other provinces, for example, Jharkhand region, seem to have simply melted out of sight. For a time, tribal Catholics who went to France found a commemorative niche in events organised by the Belgian Jesuit mission. I did go to Ranchi but I will have to go further afield to find families who remember this past.
Do you think today’s workers’ rights issue continues to be controversial?
By the conclusion of the war and into the 1920s, conditions of service improved for the departmental followers, that is, those in organised units, such as the mule drivers of the transport units, and the stretcher-bearers now placed in the Indian Hospital Corps.
But benefits remained more limited for the ‘attached’ followers, for instance, the dhobis and sweepers of the Hospital Corps and the regimental followers, the cooks, bhistis, latrine cleaners, leather workers and grooms. They continued to be considered part of the ‘menial establishment’ because their work seemed to resemble domestic service and because they included in their ranks castes who provided services that were considered ‘polluting’. One issue was controversial then and it continues to be so now.
How did history fascinate you?
I have been a teacher of history over the last 35 years at Miranda House, Delhi University; Aligarh Muslim University; and then at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. I acquired my love for history from my father, who knew how to milk a good story for all it was worth. Then there were the family stories, giving us glimpses of mediations between the big events of the time and domestic passages.