Two decades after her last book on crime and justice in early colonial India, Radhika Singha is back with a second book on the Indian Army coolies whose services in the World War 1 remain unacknowledged.
Titled The Coolie’s Great War, the book has been published by Harper Collins. Singha, who is the professor of Modern Indian History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, tells us how it was a paper on Indian non-combatants during World War I that culminated into this book.
Why and how did you choose this subject for your book?
It was 2004, and protests had erupted against proposals to send an Indian contingent in support of the American occupation of Iraq. This was what sent me to the National Archives Delhi to look up the story of the Indian Expeditionary Force sent to Ottoman Iraq (Mesopotamia) in World War I. I discovered that of the 6,75,391 Indian personnel sent here at the behest of British Empire, over half (3,48,735) were in fact non-combatants or ‘followers’.
Among these were the men in the Indian Labour and Porter Corps who loaded and unloaded supplies, constructed docks, roads, and railways, mule drivers and stretcher-bearers, ‘menial’ servants attached to regiments and military hospitals. An industrial war being conducted in a region with less population and rudimentary transport structure meant that human and animal power had to be imported in large quantities. I even found frantic letters from the army command in Mesopotamia, asking for latrine-cleaners, dhobis, cooks, horse grooms, leather workers, iron-smiths, masons and construction workers from India. I realised that India’s history during World War I could be told through a history of these different kinds of works.
How long did it take to complete the book?
It took 10 years to write this book. It took a lot of time to accumulate bits and pieces of information on figures whose services were vitally necessary but not newsworthy. For different reasons, both the colonial government and educated Indians wanted the humble figure of ‘the coolie’ to dissolve into the figure of the valorous sepoy. I had to track down police and jail records, go through ethnographies of ‘tribal’ communities, and search two theological libraries for accounts of the labour units raised by missionary bodies. Some role was played by my dreadful habit of procrastination. I am grateful that my editor did not throw me overboard for missing the centenary of the World War I.
How was the experience of visiting different areas to do research for the book?
The whole process of setting out to look up files in archives and record rooms around India on shoe-string budgets, having applied repeatedly for permission, arming oneself with clean sheets, tea-bags, milk sachets, mosquito repellent, dusters and rubber slippers, resigning oneself to hard beds and dodgy toilets, is a theme fit for a comic novel. Going by the hilarious blogs maintained by my former students, the genre of academic comedy is going to burst into bloom any time in India. It is a story tinged with sadness about rich records being destroyed by neglect, and the paucity of funds assigned for the collection and preservation. I have also had some interesting encounters with military personnel at conferences organised by the Centre for Armed Forces Historical Research in Delhi.
History is a subject that interests a few. What methods do you use to make it interesting for the students?
People usually tell me more bluntly that history was their least favourite subject! This is because history used to be taught as a set of known facts which had to be learnt by rote. The best of my university teachers used a different approach. They made me feel that I could look at a historical source, understand the context in which it was produced and explore the range of conclusions which could be drawn from it. These conclusions had to be grounded in those sources, but the dialogue could
carry on.
What are you working on next?
I have started working on the Foreigner’s Act formulated in 1864 to understand how the label of ‘foreign’ came to be deployed in police practice and created a condition of ‘deportability’. Historians have studied how the colour bar led to the deportation of Indians from prosperous parts of the British empire but deportation of ‘foreigners’ from British India remains to be explored.
Title: The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-1921
Pages: 392
Price: Rs 435
Available On Amazon.in