Soldiers: India and Pakistan in the Great War
By Leila Tarazi FawazColonial India's World War One efforts transformed the Middle East — and India, too.
NEARLY 30 KILOMETERS SOUTHWEST OF BASRA, just off the open road to Nasiriyya, stands a sun-bleached stone monument to a forgotten era. In contrast to the grandeur of some of Iraq’s more modern monuments, the Basra War Memorial blends modestly and unobtrusively into the surrounding sandy desert. Its windswept and dilapidated stone edifice commemorates the 40,500 members of the British Empire’s operations in Mesopotamia whose final resting places are unknown. Among those names chiseled into immortality in the lengthy stone walkway framing a central pillar are the sons of India. An engraved sentence “as sad as any I’ve read in war” caught the eye of BBC reporter Fergal Keane while he accompanied coalition troops during the 2003 Iraq war: “It says simply: For Subhadar Mahanga and 1,770 other Indian soldiers.”
Such unassuming memorials as in that empty stretch of desert near Basra pay tribute to the extraordinary sacrifice of Indian soldiers, among others, who deployed to fight in the Great War. Yet despite these soldiers’ journeys across the seas and into the heartland of the Ottoman Empire, the Indian contribution to World War I in the Middle East is considerably less acknowledged outside the British Isles and the Indian subcontinent.
In truth, the links between the Middle East and South Asia go back centuries; the Great War served to bring the two populations even closer and in larger numbers than ever before. It was Indians, Egyptians, Australians, and other colonial subjects who manned the trenches and peopled the platoons that fought and won the war in the Middle East for the British. The presence of such large numbers of foreigners in the heart of the Middle East represented an opening that built on centuries-old contacts between South Asia and the Middle East.
As 1914 dawned, major combat operations seemed a distant prospect to the soldiers of the Indian army. At the start of monsoon season that summer, the Indian army comprised a mere 155,000 men organized into nine divisions and eight cavalry brigades. To the Indian soldier of early 1914, it would have been unimaginable that by the time the Armistice was signed four years later, India would provide one-tenth of the manpower of the British war effort — more than 1.27 million men, including 827,000 combatants. Altogether, nearly 60,000 Indians died fighting for the crown on the battlefields of Mesopotamia and France.
EARLY IN THE CONFLICT, BRITAIN insisted on conscripting only particular types of Indians. Since the 1850s, British military recruitment efforts bypassed the educated masses of urban India and instead focused on the illiterate teenage peasants from north and northwest — a region that was, by 1914, home to 80 percent of India’s 57 million Muslims — whom the Brits saw as infused with a warrior spirit.
At the outset of the Great War, Punjab alone accounted for 60 percent of India’s military conscripts. Their ranks were joined by Sikhs, Rajputs, Gurkhas, Jats, Dogras, Pathans, Hindustani Muslims, Ahirs, and almost 70 other population groups. Together, they crossed the Indian Ocean into foreign lands to do battle on behalf of the Crown.
In organizing their Indian forces, the British reinforced martial class demarcations by assigning recruits to ethnically, spiritually, or linguistically homogeneous companies and even regiments. Emphasizing group distinctions mitigated the potential for uprising, as the distinctive “religious practices, dietary restrictions and religious ceremonies” of homogeneously constructed regiments fostered separate and cohesive identities. The hierarchy of Indian society, transplanted to the battlefield, shaped the interactions of, and colored the relationships within, Indian units. As losses undermined homogeneity and replacement officers dwindled in quality and numbers, Indian units suffered along with their British counterparts.
Yet unlike their British counterparts, few Indians rode the wave of emotional patriotism that swept the home isles. Historian David Omissi’s careful combing of Indian soldiers’ war letters shows that “people never mentioned in the letters read like a political Who’s Who of World War I: Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, Herbert Asquith, Lenin, Trotsky, and Gandhi.” More than anything, it seems that the focus, instead, on family, clan, and caste helped inspire the Indian soldiers as warfare intensified from frontier patrols to frontal charges.
The Ottomans were well aware of the Indian Muslim presence in the British lines, and they moved promptly to exploit their status as coreligionists. Because almost one-third of these new infantrymen with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force were Muslim, Ottoman frontline patrols were accompanied by the regimental imam, who would sing prayers at the British troops, hoping to lure defectors. In response, British staff officers intensified their vigilance when Indian soldiers were on leave in contact with Ottomans. Intelligence officers at Suez, Ismailia, and al-Qantara kept watch for Ottoman propaganda, while military police toured frontline divisions, showing soldiers photographs of the appalling conditions of Indian prisoners of war. When possible, leave parties were organized to Jerusalem to visit religious sites; after the end of hostilities, small groups were able to participate in the pilgrimage to Mecca.
That many Indians were
Muslim was a source of angst for the British military— and a wellspring of
possibility for the Ottoman Empire.
In retrospect, the Ottoman effort was mostly ineffective at sparking Indian military defections. When religion proved ineffective, the Ottomans attempted other propaganda strategies. One Indian battalion in Mesopotamia was greeted by a shower of Hindi pamphlets warning them that “England was starving and would soon be unable to feed and clothe them.” The Indian officers wrote a reply and requested it be dropped on the Ottomans. It included the lines, “We have never been fed and clothed so well, but prisoners taken from you are in rags. … We will never cease to fight for the King Emperor Jarj Panjam [George V] until the evil Kaiser is utterly trodden into the mud.”
The Ottoman effort failed in
part because so many Indian Muslims separated political duty from religious
fealty, thereby easing their anxieties over the war. But that loyalty sometimes
strained to overcome cultural obstacles. Sikhs, for example, refused to wear
steel shrapnel helmets, citing religious prohibitions against the wearing of
such hats. Meanwhile, the war diary of a Punjabi regiment describes the
challenges the British faced during one cholera inoculation campaign in
Mesopotamia in the spring of 1916: “The Khattacks except the Indian officers
and NCOs refused to be done as they still believed the stories they had heard
in Egypt about all inoculation rendering men impotent. Even when told in turn
that this inoculation was not voluntary but by order they still refused, and
had to be marched back to camp under arrest. Subedar Major Mir Akbar found out
who was at the bottom of this refusal and persuaded them to agree to be
inoculated the following day.”
Indian
British artillery in Palestine; conflicting dates of 1917 and 1920. Photo via
Library of Congress.
DESPITE THE BEST EFFORTS OF
THE BRITISH,
public opinion in colonial India included a noticeable sympathy for the
Ottomans. As with troops in the field, on the Indian subcontinent, an attempt
was made to limn out a distinction between the political and religious aspects
of the war — an attempt with limited success.
The removal of the partition
of Bengal in 1911 had encouraged Indian Muslims predisposed to extraneous
cultural influences and sensitive to their Muslim status to reflect on their
loyalties. Such potentially pro-Ottoman predispositions were given voice in
newspapers such as Comrade, Hamdard, Al-Hilal, and Zamindar,
which expressed regret at the Ottoman entry into the war but emphasized
pan-Islamic solidarity, the sacredness of the Islamic holy sites, the British
annexation of Egypt, and Ottoman victories in places such as Gallipoli.
At the beginning of the war,
Sultan Mehmed V issued a fatwa for jihad in order to address the question of
loyalty: “The Moslem subjects of Russia, of France, of England and of all the
countries that side with them in their land and sea attacks dealt against the
Caliphate for the purpose of annihilating Islam, must these subjects, too, take
part in the Holy War against the respective governments from which they depend?
Yes.”
The British fear of uprising was
real during the war, but after 1915 the threat never rose above mere potential.
Ultimately, proof of Indian sympathy for the Ottoman caliphate emerged after
the war in the form of the Khilafat movement of 1919 to 1924, organized by
Muslims in India in support of the Ottoman Empire. None other than Mahatma
Gandhi lent strong support to the cause of the Khilafat during the mass
noncooperation movement against the British in the aftermath of the Great War.
For Indians both at home and
in the military, tales told by the returning wounded constituted a central
source of news and information. Alarming reports of drought and disease began
to reach the front in 1915, compounding such anxieties among soldiers. The
impressions created were of a brutal, grim conflict — sowing doubts among
prospective Indian soldiers who weighed the promised rewards for enlistment
against the dangers of combat. Punjabi folks songs from the era maintain a
telling emotional distance from all the war’s partisans, and a conviction that
for the poor, war, above all, meant suffering.
Ultimately, Ottoman
efforts to exploit this shared religious identity failed, in part because so
many Indian Muslims separated political duty from religious fealty.
Although Indian soldiers knew
their missives faced the probing eyes of British censors — and therefore likely
shaped their letters to pass muster — some felt a genuine connection to the
war. One soldier wrote that this was “the time to show one’s loyalty to the
Sirkar, to earn a name for oneself. To die on the battlefield is glory. For a
thousand years, one’s name will be remembered.” Bonds forged in the crucible of
trench combat reinforced morale. Echoing a refrain heard across military
history, one soldier confided, “I cannot describe to you how great fascination
there is in fighting at the front. One experiences a feeling of exhilaration.”
These concomitant feelings of
loyalty and exhilaration were doubly tested at the outset of Sharif Husayn’s
Arab Revolt in June 1916. It was a jolting event for Indian Muslims, whose
incredulity hardened into criticism at the revolt for risking the sanctity of
Islam’s holy sites. Throughout India, anti-Arab feeling was apparent; the
All-India Muslim League in Lucknow embodied the reaction of political actors across
Muslim India: “The Arab rebels headed by the Sharif of Mecca, whose outrageous
conduct may place in jeopardy the safety and sanctity of the holy places of
Islam in the Hejaz and Mesopotamia.”
Nonetheless, in the letters
that Omissi curates, ideological discussions or broader political dynamics
generally rank behind concerns of the familial strains caused by war. One
Punjabi soldier argued that while “those who do not put their hearts into the
work of fighting the King’s enemies are clearly worthy of the greatest blame,”
it is incumbent on the king to ameliorate the burdens of extended deployment.
He continued, “[The Caliph] Hazrat Umar … had a law passed that in future every
married soldier should be allowed to return to his home on leave once every six
months. I have been astonished to think that when we have such a King, renowned
throughout the world for his kindness and justice, he has never considered this
problem.”
Indian soldiers faced a
mixture of socioeconomic hardship and ideological pressure. Some units mutinied
rather than face their brethren on the battlefield, while some Pathans even
fired on their own sentries before deserting their ranks. According to official
figures, after four years of war almost half of the Punjabi deserters remained
at large. Some soldiers worried about the desertions and what they said about
the honorability of the overall unit. Others worried over the condition of
their Indian comrades who were imprisoned after mutinying. As the war ground
on, an increasing number sought to escape the front through self-inflicted
wounds, often to their left hands and feet, while night blindness in one unit
was discovered to be mostly self-induced.
FOR GREAT BRITAIN, EGYPT'S
STRATEGIC VALUE was
immeasurable: an equidistant geopolitical hub between the Middle East and
Europe for deployments ranging from Basra to Marseilles. Since the British
takeover of Egypt in 1882, maintaining control over the Suez Canal became the sine
qua non of London’s regional strategy. Thirty-four feet deep, 100 miles
long, and 190 feet wide at minimum, the Suez Canal constituted a formidable
waterway, more than one-third of which was naturally protected by lakes and
floodplains. The rest, however, would need to be protected by troops. It would
be defended at all costs.
By January 1915 the British
had increased the Suez defense to 70,000 soldiers drawn from across the empire:
Indians, Australians, New Zealanders, all united to defend the canal. Although
the government controlled any reporting on troop movements, the disembarkation
of thousands of Indians at railway stations inevitably sparked curiosity. “The
streets of Egypt were packed with English and Indian soldiers staying at
Heliopolis and Zeytun,” al-Ahram reported. “The crowds gathered to watch
them and some thought that the Indians looked exactly like the Japanese.” In
Egypt, separate military encampments did limit somewhat the interaction between
Indians and Egyptians, and British apprehension at the prospect of thousands of
Indian men stationed in Egypt caused them to declare Port Said — a noted
prostitution center — as entirely “out of bounds.” Some, however, readily
resigned themselves to their new milieu, even taking to their new setting
enthusiastically. In four years of war, India sent 95,000 combatants and 135,000
noncombatants to the Egyptian and Palestine front.
Scouts
for an Indian cavalry regiment pause to consult a map near Vraignes,
France; April 1917. Photo via Imperial War Museum.
IN THE PREDAWN HOURS OF EARLY
FEBRUARY 1915,
Indian sentries spied the silhouetted mass of an Ottoman attacking force
silently pushing off the east bank of the Suez and making its way toward their
defensive works. In the ensuing battle, Punjabis trained heavy fire on pontoons
and other amphibious assault craft, sinking them in rapid succession, with
Rajputs, Egyptians, and Sikhs participating in the operation.
As one of the first
Egyptian-Indian actions of the war against the Ottomans, the first Suez
offensive set the tone for the ensuing battle over Palestine. Several Indian
divisions saw action on disparate fronts from the lush countryside of France to
the barren desert of Mesopotamia. Then, following the surrender of Baghdad,
these troops joined newly arrived Indian cavalry — redeployed from Europe — to
help form the Egyptian Expeditionary Corps.
Although they would win him
brilliant victories, culminating in the Battle of Megiddo in northern Palestine
in September 1918, Field Marshal Edmund Allenby, leader of the Egyptian
Expeditionary Force, invoked some of the same stereotypes as his contemporaries
in discussing his colonial men. In the aftermath of one Pathan outpost
deserting to the Ottomans, Allenby was piqued. “If I could be reinforced by 3
or 4 good divisions … I could, I think, really get a move on my Turks.” So it must
have been disheartening to Allenby when in late 1917 London accelerated the
“Indianization” of his force.
Increasing the number of
Indians in the Egyptian Expeditionary Corps was Britain’s effort to build up
Allenby’s troops “without having to make recourse to fresh drafts from Britain,
which was facing accumulating manpower problems.” British planners also hoped
to draw on the organizational skills and combat experiences of Indian units
acclimated to three years of war in the Middle East. The perceived downside to
such a move was the risk of stationing in Palestine large numbers of Indian
Muslims in direct opposition and proximity to their Ottoman coreligionists. By
late 1917, the gears of the Indian recruiting system were rotating at full
speed, enabling such a policy shift.
The increasing
“Indianization” of Britain’s army was born of necessity and occurred
amidst British jitters over stationing Indian Muslims in proximity to
their Ottoman coreligionists.
On December 11, 1917, Allenby
dismounted and walked into Jerusalem, prompting Prime Minister Lloyd George to
advocate a major offensive to break out into Greater Syria, thereby refocusing
“a Eurocentric effort he regarded as counterproductive.” In response, Allenby
submitted his resourcing requirements for further action. Allenby’s plans,
however, were soon interrupted by a massive, last-ditch German offensive
launched in March 1918 in Flanders and France, an attack that ripped large
holes in two British armies. Allenby’s hopes for British reinforcements died
along with entire divisions in the fields of Flanders and France. As the War
Office rapidly recalled troops to Europe to stem the rising German tide, the
pace of “Indianization” in Palestine quickened. While Allenby’s deceptions
eventually outmaneuvered the Germans and Ottomans, the war itself was fought
and won largely by an Indian and Egyptian force.
Integral to that victory was
“the last great cavalry campaign in history.” Although Indian infantry
prepared, assaulted, and broke through the Ottoman lines during Allenby’s fall
offensive, it was the Desert Mounted Corps that pushed through the Ottoman gaps
and prevented an orderly Ottoman retreat. This sweeping cavalry ride
accomplished what European troops had been unable to do in the stalemate of
Europe. New York Times correspondent W. T. Massey reported on “great feats by
the cavalry” and described Indian charges: “brilliantly … perfectly
timed … masterly success … a feat almost without parallel in this war.”
As in past conflicts, the
cavalry also served as raiders and intelligence gatherers. Charles Trench, an
Indian army officer in the 1930s who became known for his popular historical
works, relates one such raid during the “dash up the coast:”
Just short of Damascus a
squadron of the Poona Horse charged in error a body of Arabs who proved too
elusive for them. They did, however, bag a large motor-car containing a
European splendidly Arab-garbed. Suspecting a German spy, Risaldar Major Hamir
Singh demanded his surrender, and there ensued a heated altercation, neither
understanding one word the other said. It transpired that this individual’s
name was Lawrence, and that he had something to do with the Sharif of Mecca’s
forces.
As Trench suggests, this
incident may in part account for T. E. Lawrence’s general bias toward the
Indian army. The incident notwithstanding, Allenby’s attack — up the coastal
plain, through the central Palestinian highlands, and across the Jordan River
valley — inspired pride among Indian troops. Testifying to their momentum, in
all of 1918 the Egyptian Expeditionary Force suffered only a few dozen
desertions.
That is not to say, however,
that Allenby’s thrust through Palestine was simple. Although it is often
portrayed as swift and active in comparison to the static European front,
conditions in Palestine were far from ideal and cost Allenby 9,980 Indian and
native troops. While British captains often fixed bayonets and ordered charges,
it was mostly Indian units who executed those orders. Their suffering is
exemplified in the Indian experience at Kut, while their determination was
rewarded with the eventual capture of Baghdad.
Indeed, it was in Mesopotamia
where the pain of defeat and the exhilaration of victory merged into one.
Indian
troops man a three-pound, wagon-mounted Hotchkiss gun on the railway between
Basra and Nasiriya. Photo via Imperial War Museum
IT BEGAN IN NOVEMBER 1914, when the Indian Sixth
Division was dispatched to capture Basra and secure the Anglo-Persian oil
installations. Facing them in Mesopotamia were 17,000 infantrymen, 380 cavalry,
44 field guns, and three machine guns. By the time of the Armistice, over 600,000
Indian men had, in one form or another, experienced the great convulsion of
Mesopotamian warfare. In the beginning, a large-scale war along the Tigris
seemed unlikely. However, after a series of initial victories, British
decision-makers were tempted by the ease of their early advances and cast
strategic prudence aside.
Lord Hardinge, the British
viceroy, argued in November 1915 that “our success hitherto in Mesopotamia has
been the main factor which has kept Persia, Afghanistan, and India itself
quiet.” Ultimately, however, the blame for one of the greatest catastrophes in
British military history — the defeat at Kut — rests on the commanders on the
spot, in particular General John Nixon. Nixon’s preference for an ethos of
inspirational leadership came at the expense of logistical preparation. The
Tigris expedition faced one logistical hurdle after another; unfortunately,
Nixon’s confidence in the fighting spirit of his men came at the expense of
such indispensable work as the development of the port of Basra. Martial valor
proved no substitute for careful preparation.
From the beginning, life
inside besieged Kut was emotionally and physically torturous. As the historian
Nikolas Gardner has detailed, the Ottomans bombarded Kut with “leaflets printed
in various Indian languages calling on sepoys to murder their British officers
and join the Turks.” As elsewhere, this Ottoman initiative had little effect,
but it reminded Townshend of the dilemma Indian soldiers faced fighting in a
foreign land against coreligionists while subsisting on inadequate provisions
and receiving insufficient medical care. As the siege dragged on, conditions
only worsened.
On January 20, 1916, as the
prospect of immediate relief was dwindling and vegetables and other food grew
scarce inside Kut, Townshend ordered his men to halve their rations. The
garrison’s tinned meat supplies gave way to an even less appetizing reality:
the consumption of pack animals.
An
emaciated Indian soldier who survived the siege at Kut. Photo via Imperial War
Museum.
Although famished, many
Indians refused to incorporate horse and mule into their daily diet, as they
considered themselves prohibited by religious rules from doing so, and fretted
that their comrades would share news of this trespass upon returning home.
Townshend sought to overcome his soldiers’ hesitations by soliciting statements
from Indian religious leaders, posted throughout Kut, “sanctioning the
consumption of horseflesh.”
Moreover, the soldiers’
reliance on diminishing and inadequate rations of flour and unprocessed grain
led to outbreaks of pneumonia, jaundice, and dysentery at alarmingly high
levels. On March 7, 1916, the daily ration was set at 10 ounces of barley flour
and four of parched barley grain; by the end of the month, rations were further
reduced to six and four ounces, respectively. In mid-April, after rations were
reduced to four ounces of flour, roughly 10,000 Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims
relented and began consuming horsemeat. For some, it was already too late; by
one author’s documentation, in consuming less than half of the calories
necessary to maintain their strength, British soldiers lost an average of 12.5
pounds, while Indians lost approximately 17 pounds during the siege. Reads one
soldier’s memoir: “We are a sick army, a skeleton army rocking with cholera and
disease.” A small percentage of the force despaired; desertions rose, and
others committed suicide.
Surrender followed. Conditions
did not change quickly after the fall of Kut. One major summarized the state of
conditions while entrenched with Punjabis in simple, unexaggerated staccato:
“Heat is appalling and only just beginning. Flies bite hard and are in
thousands. Cholera has started. … We lie and gasp all day. … Meals are
practically an impossibility on account of the flies.” He later describes a
march in which “men fell like flies” as more than “1,000 collapsed from heat
and lack of water. … Men simply crumpled up.”
These conditions were endured
by a particularly large number of Indian soldiers, since more than twice as
many fought in Mesopotamia as in France (or Palestine). The influence of these
theaters could not have been equal; Mesopotamia, more than Palestine or France,
shaped the Indian soldier.
Thirty percent of the Indian
force would not survive their Ottoman internment.
IN THE GREAT WAR, SOUTH ASIANS
WERE CRITICAL to
Triple Entente victories around the Gulf, in Palestine, and throughout Greater
Syria. This fact alone justifies paying increased attention to the Indians who
fought in the Middle East, especially when compared to the enormous scholarship
devoted to their European counterparts. Set aside their military contributions,
however, and an additional rationale for studying these South Asians emerges.
It was Indians,
Egyptians, Australians, and other colonial subjects who manned the trenches and
peopled the platoons that fought and won the war in the Middle East for
the British.
By traveling across the Indian
Ocean and into the Middle East, these men experienced new worlds and new
people. In Palestine, they fought with the Arab Revolt; in Mesopotamia, they
suffered among rivertine tribes; on Gallipoli, they charged Ottoman Turks; and
in Cairo, they experienced cosmopolitan urbanites.
A diverse array of Indians
encountered an equally diverse group of Middle Easterners for four intensive
years, deepening and broadening a long-standing connection between the two
regions. As the Middle East transitioned into its postwar era, its interactions
and experiences with South Asia became an important part of its historical
memory.
* * *
Leila Tarazi Fawaz is Issam M. Fares Professor of Lebanese and Eastern
Mediterranean Studies at Tufts University. This piece is adapted from her
book, A Land of Aching Hearts:
The Middle East in the Great War, available from Harvard University Press
Source: wilsonquarterly
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