Many people do think of the war as a European War, or maybe they think that the US was also
involved, but this was a true world war, with soldiers from every continent except Antarctica.
And one place that sent more than a million men to the war was India.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War special episode about India and the First
World War.
In 1914, India had not been involved in any large-scale conflicts outside of its immediate
area for a long time.
There had been wars in its own neighborhood, though.
The first and second Afghan Wars and the Three Burmese wars saw the participation of the
Indian Army.
Indian forces had also been in colonial expeditions in Africa, and a small contingent in Europe
during the Russo-Turkish war, but only really the sepoys - Indian soldiers under British
command.
The bulk of India’s population, which the ruling British Raj thought unfit for military
service, remained largely unaffected.
The First World War, though, affected the Indian population, directly or indirectly,
like no event since the First Indian War for Independence in 1857 had done.
India was such a large reservoir of human and material resources that the British Empire,
faced with shortages of both, had no choice but to tap that reservoir, regardless of their
own reservations regarding it’s worth.
There were plenty of people in India who were against Imperial rule.
The Swadeshi - self-sufficiency - Movement was an economic strategy aimed at removing
Britain from power and improving India’s economy.
It boycotted British products and revived domestic products and production, and had
some success.
The Second Swadeshi Movement, from 1905 to 1911, was the most successful Pre-Gandhi movement,
and Swadeshi as a strategy was a key focus of Gandhi’s, who described it as the soul
of self-rule.
The war fanned a flame of anti-colonial nationalism around the world and there were many who believed
that the inter-European conflict exploded the myth of the superiority of Western Civilization
by exposing its dark underside of violence and barbarity.
That theme had been developing in India for a couple decades by the war’s start and
found expression particularly in the writings of Mohandas Gandhi, during his time as a lawyer
in South Africa.
He argued against India’s choosing a path of violence against British domination, arguing
that by doing that they would be just mimicking the west and could not attain true self-rule.
The exposure to the horrors of industrialized warfare in World War One added some persuasion
to his argument.
There were anti-British revolutionaries who tried to take advantage of the war to fight
British rule.
There was Jatin Mukherjee in India or the Berlin Committee in Germany, which was a propaganda
agency supported by German intelligence that was directed at Indian soldiers who had been
taken prisoner.
And the Ghadr - Revolution - Party in California, which revolved around a newspaper for the
small but rapidly growing Sikh diaspora, are examples, but by 1917 it was clear that these
were failures.
But also by then the war had become increasingly unpopular in India, at first by economics,
and then by the losses of men to the war, particularly in Punjab Province where a large
part of the men came from.
Some of the pre-1914 extreme nationalists took advantage of this to make a political
comeback.
There were “Home Rule Leagues”, loosely knit organizations inspired by the Irish,
and though they did not directly oppose the war, they tried to use it to push an agenda
of self-rule.
Gandhi, who returned to India in 1915, actually called on Indians to enlist in the army, despite
his own belief in non-violence, in the hope that such loyalty would be rewarded postwar
with large political concessions.
A declaration in 1917 by British Secretary of State for India Sir Samuel Montagu made
vague promises of a measure of self-government, but signaled no major change in British policy.
Gandhi’s disappointment over this led him to openly oppose the Raj in 1919 with his
first attempts to apply to India the lessons learned in South Africa about non-violent
resistance, which made him a household name in India, but which is outside the scope of
this channel.
But the mindset of a chunk of the middle class, loyal before the war, appeared to have been
changed by the war.
The All-India Home Rule League was founded in 1916 to lead the demand for self-government
and obtain the same Dominion status in the Empire as Australia or Canada.
The National Headquarters was in Delhi, though the main activity was in Bombay, Calcutta,
and Madras.
This movement created considerable excitement and, particularly under the leadership of
Annie Besant, managed to produce a remarkable alliance of moderates and radicals, as well
as the Indian National Congress and the All India Muslim League.
After Besant was arrested in 1917, the movement spread to the interior villages.
The war had put an end to a period of relative economic prosperity, though that prosperity
had never reached the mass population.
It rested on the export of cash crops like cotton and tea.
Coal mining and steel were also on the rise.
But the massive requisitioning of things like cereals for the one and a half million Indians
who served in the war led to a rapid rise in food prices that hurt the urban poor and
agricultural laborers.
Exports of cash crops suffered from the loss of the German market and the threat of submarines.
The steel mills were saved from bankruptcy by a contract to supply rails for the 1,500
miles of railway the British built in Mesopotamia during the war.
The main beneficiary of the war was the domestic manufacturing industry, but the bulk of the
people saw a decline in an already low purchasing power, and the role played by India in the
Imperial economy diminished.
This was partly also from the demographic disaster of the Spanish Flu, that in the space
of a year resulted in something up to 20 million deaths in India, which was as much as a third
of the global deaths from the flu pandemic.
Over 60,000 Indians died in the war, and a slightly larger number than that were wounded.
These numbers are low compared to the European nations fighting, but the departure of so
many soldiers and laborers in total had a serious effect on rural and “tribal” areas.
The soldiers themselves fought on the Western Front, Gallipoli, the Middle East, in Africa,
and even at the Siege of Tsing-Tao.
The Indian Expeditionary Force arrived in France just six weeks after the war broke
out and fought at places like Ypres and Neuve-Chappelle, but they were hurt by a lack of familiarity
with the new equipment, having been trained more for colonial war.
They had nearly no artillery and they were not used to European weather and resisting
the cold, so morale did suffer.
Except for the cavalry divisions, they were sent to Egypt in late 1915 to fight in conditions
to which they were better suited.
Still, 130,000 Indians fought on the Western Front all told.
The largest force of Indians served in Mesopotamia, from November 1914 to the end.
They fought up the Tigris, they were a large part of the force that surrendered at Kut,
and then in 1917 they took Baghdad, and the following year fought the Battle of Sharqat,
which resulted in the armistice of Mudros.
The Mesopotamian army was largely composed of Indian troops.
We’ll see those battles in depth in the regular episodes.
The First World War certainly exposed India to global currents.
In four years, more Indians left India for faraway lands than in the preceding 100 years.
Most of those men returned, bringing new ideas, products, and customs.
At home, the war gave a big boost to the rise of Indian nationalism and the rejection of
“western” violence as a means to that end.
Of course, there is a lot more to it, and you’re encouraged to look it up for yourselves.
Today was just a general introduction to India before and during the war, where Indian soldiers
did, time and again, prove themselves as the capable soldiers that their own government
did not much believe in just four years earlier.
Thanks to Pratik Gokhale for the research.