‘Do not think
that this is war. This is not war. It is the ending of the world. This is just
such a war as was related in the Mahabharata [the
Indian epic] about our forefathers’, wrote a wounded Indian soldier from a
hospital in England on 29 January 1915. This anonymous sepoy [from the Persian word sipahi meaning soldier] was one
among over one million Indians, including over 621,224 combatants and 474,789
non-combatants, sent overseas between August 1914 and December 1919 for the
Great War.
Most of the
sepoys were recruited from the peasant-warrior classes of North and
North-Western India, in accordance with the theory of the ‘martial races’, with
Punjab (spread across present-day India and Pakistan) contributing more than
half the number of combatants. They came from diverse religious backgrounds,
including Punjabi Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus. The Indian army was a
multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious force. Many of these men were
semi- or non-literate and did not leave behind the abundance of diaries, poems
and memoirs that form the cornerstone of the European war memory.
No comments:
Post a Comment