Amitav Ghosh's Blog, page 14

Shared Sorrows – 14

  Shared Sorrows: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-‘Ain, 1916-18 – 14   Sisir Sarbadhikari was not the only Indian in the Ras al-’Ain camp for long: it soon began to fill up with British, Russian and Indian POWs including many other members of the Bengal Ambulance Corps, his friend Bhola [...]

Shared Sorrows – 13

    Shared Sorrows: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-‘Ain, 1916-18 – 13   Amongst Sisir’s particular friends in the hospital there was an Armenian called George. ‘His home was in Diyarbakir;’ Sisir writes, ‘his sons and daughters had all been killed; he had somehow managed to escape to Aleppo with [...]

Shared Sorrows – 12

  Shared Sorrows: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-‘Ain, 1916-18 – 12.   The Indian POWs who were being treated at the Central Hospital in Aleppo, in 1916, discovered soon enough that they had many commonalities with their erstwhile ‘enemies’ – that is to say, the Turkish soldiers who were also [...]

Shared Sorrows – 11

  Shared Sorrows: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-‘Ain, 1916-18 – 11.   Towards the end of November 1916, after he had spent a couple of weeks at the Central Hospital in Aleppo, Sisir too was struck down by the typhus. For about a month he was so sick that at [...]

Shared Sorrows – 10

    Shared Sorrows: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-‘Ain, 1916-18 – 10     Even as prisoners within the Ottoman Empire, Sisir Sarbadhikari and his fellow Indian POWs were constantly reminded of their inferiority in the imperial hierarchy. Sisir touches on this theme often, especially in relation to the sums [...]

Shared Sorrows – 9

    Shared Sorrows: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-‘Ain, 1916-18 – 9   On Nov 19, Sisir left for Aleppo with some 50 seriously ill patients, on a mail train. They traveled in awful conditions: locked in a windowless compartment they had to relieve themselves in the corners.     [...]

Shared Sorrows – 8

    Shared Sorrows: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-‘Ain, 1916-18 – 8.   On September 7 1916, one hundred of the Indian prisoners who had marched to Ras al-’Ain with Sisir Sarbadhikari started working on an Ottoman rail line .       [This picture is from the  Imperial War [...]

Shared Sorrows – 7

  Shared Sorrows: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-‘Ain, 1916-18 – 7   Sisir Sarbadhikari recounts another story about the deserted Armenian village that he and his fellow POWs marched through on the northwards march from Mosul: when he went to look into a well a swarm of insects flew out. [...]

Shared Sorrows – 6

    Shared Sorrows: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-‘Ain, 1916-18 – 6.   [Below is a map of the region referred to in this and the last few posts, with the boundaries of the administrative divisions  (vilayet) of the Ottoman Empire marked.]           To return to [...]

Shared Sorrows – 5

    Shared Sorrows: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-‘Ain, 1916-18 – 5   A few words about Sisir Sarbadhikari’s book. On to Baghdad was self-published, as I’ve said, and it seems to have vanished quickly into obscurity. I first learnt of its existence through the work of a military historian, [...]