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This is the first cultural and literary history of India and the First World War, with archival research from Europe and South Asia.
List of contents
Introduction; Part I. The Restless Home Front; 1. The imperial-nationalist self: anti-discrimination, aspiration, and anxiety; 2. Sonorous fields: recruitment, resistance, and recitative in the Punjab; Part II. Race and Representation: 3. Five shades of brown: the sepoy-body in visual culture; 4. Imperial antibiotic: sepoy and the Raj; Part III. The Sepoy Heart: 5. Touching feeling: letters, poems, prayers, and songs of sepoys in Europe 1914-18; 6. 'Their lives have become ours': occupation, captivity, and lateral contact in Mesopotamia 1914-1918; 7. Transnational lives and peripheral visions; Part IV. Literary and Intellectual Cultures: 8. Literary imaginings; 9. The Indian English war novel: Across the Black Waters; 10. Post-war world and 'the future of mankind': Aurobindo, Iqbal, and Tagore.
About the author
Santanu Das, educated in Kolkata and Cambridge, is Professor of English Literature at King's College London and joins All Souls College, Oxford as Senior Research Fellow in English in 2019. He is the author of the award-winning monograph Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge, 2006) and the pictorial history Indian Troops in Europe, 1914–1918 (2014), and the editor of Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge, 2011) and the Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War (Cambridge, 2013). He presented the series 'Soldiers of the Empire' for BBC Radio 4 and has contributed to various events commemorating the war, from radio and television programmes to exhibitions, performances, and concerts.
Summary
The book recovers the sensuous worlds of combatants, non-combatants, and civilians from undivided India in World War One. Combining extensive archival research with readings of Kipling, Gandhi, and Tagore, it is the first cultural and literary history on the subject and opens up war studies to South Asian and postcolonial scholarship.
