SASC Colloquium: The Indian Sepoy in the First World War: from Fugitive Fragments to Centennial Commemoration, Santanu Das

Undivided India joined the First World War as part of the British empire, contributing one and half million men, including 900,000 combatants and 600,000 non-combatants, who served in places as far-flung as the Western Front, Mesopotamia, East Africa, Gallipoli, Egypt, and Palestine. This paper both draws on and develops some of the arguments latent in India, Empire, and First World War Culture (2018). Starting with heterogeneous sources from across Europe and South Asia – trench artifacts, photographs, paintings, letters, POW sound-recordings, and two largely unknown memoirs – the paper investigates the sensuous heterogeneity of combatant and non-combatant worlds in Europe and Mesopotamia, the fantasies and anxieties that shaped their representations and self-representations, and the way such memories get instrumentalized in India and the UK today. There are two underlying points: first, the role of the ‘aesthetic’, both as source-material and a mode of inquiry, in excavating the past (particularly histories of emotion from below); second, whether it is possible to ‘commemorate’ the war dead without endorsing their deeds or values?
Bio:
Santanu Das is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture and Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford. He is the author of Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge, 2006) and the editor of Race, Empire and First World War Writing (2008) and Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War. His latest book India, Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (Cambridge, 2018) was awarded the Hindu Non-Fiction Prize and the Ananda Coomaraswamy Award. He is now working on the experiences and aesthetics of sea-voyages from Victorian times to now as well as on a book of essays tentatively titled Poetics of Experience: Modernity, Emotion, and the Literary.