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List of contents
Introduction: Franziska Roy, Heike Liebau
Part I: Histories of the Prisoners 1. Lost Engagements? Traces of South Asian Soldiers in German Captivity, 1915-1918: Ravi Ahuja 3. South Asian Civilian Prisoners of War in First World War Germany: Franziska Roy 4. The German Foreign Office, Indian Emigrants and Propaganda Efforts Among the ‘Sepoys’: Heike Liebau 5. German Perceptions of Enemy Colonial Troops, 19141918: Christian Koller
6. South Asian Soldiers and German Academics: Anthropological, Linguistic and Musicological Field Studies in Prison Camps: Britta Lange
Part II: Histories of the Sources 7. Recordings of South Asian Languages and Music in the Lautarchiv of the Humboldt University Berlin: Jürgen Mahrenholz 8. Indian Prisoners of War in World War One- Photographs as Source Material: Margot Kahleyss 9. Hindostan – A Camp Newspaper for South-Asian Prisoners of World War One in Germany: Heike Liebau.
Short Biographies
About the author
Franziska Roy is doctoral candidate at the Department of History of the University of Warwick.
Heike Liebau is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies (Berlin).
Ravi Ahuja is professor of modern Indian history and the director of the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Göttingen.
Summary
The book is a moving account of about two thousand South Asians mostly sailors and soldiers from villages in Bengal, Nepal, the Northwest Frontier and Punjab, who were held for years in German prison camps. They attracted the close attention of army officers, diplomats and secret agents, of emigrant revolutionaries of India, of German artists, academics and industrialists. The book introduces and makes available rich German archives as yet unknown to the non-German speaking world.