Amitav Ghosh's Blog, page 22

At Home and the World in Iraq 1915-17: part 2

    The tension between the voices of the grandmother and the military historian runs through the length of Mokkhoda-debi’s Kalyan-Pradeep. It is reflected even in the form of the book: the sections are numbered in the manner of a military dispatch.       Here is Mokkhoda-debi the military historian, writing about the expedition’s [...]

The ‘Home and the World’ in Iraq 1915-17: Part 1

    Mokkhoda (Mokshada) Debi’s Kalyan Pradeep,     (published 1928) is, in essence, the author’s tribute, as a grandmother, to her daughter’s son, Kalyan, who was a casualty of the Mesopotamian campaign of 1915-16.   Mokkhoda Debi was a minor literary figure in Bengal at the turn of the 19th century. Like Rabindranath Tagore [...]

The ‘Home and the World’ in Iraq 1916

    Mokkhoda (Mokshada) Debi’s Kalyan Pradeep,     (published 1928) is, in essence, the author’s tribute, as a grandmother, to her daughter’s son, Kalyan, who was a casualty of the Mesopotamian campaign of 1915-16.   Mokkhoda Debi was a minor literary figure in Bengal at the turn of the 19th century. Like Rabindranath Tagore [...]

From Iraq 1915-17: Lost Treasures of Indian Writing

    Race, Empire and First World War Writing (ed. Santanu Das, Cambridge University Press, 2011) is an ambitious collection:   it attempts to cover the whole spectrum of non-European involvement in the First World War, with articles on soldiers and auxiliaries from China, Vietnam, India, West and North Africa, Jamaica and elsewhere.     [...]

‘When the War Began We Heard of Several Kings’

    Among recent publications on the Indian role in the First World War, one of the most important is a collection entitled  When the War Began We Heard of Several Kings: South Asian Prisoners in World War I Germany, by  Franziska Roy, Heike Liebau and Ravi Ahuja (Social Science Press, 2011). §     [...]

‘Indian Voices of the Great War’

      The last few years have seen a long-overdue awakening of interest in the Indian soldiers and auxiliaries who participated in the First World War (it goes without saying that I use the word ‘Indian’ here in its pre-1947 sense, when it applied to people from all over the subcontinent). David Omissi, the [...]

‘Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature’

First World War writing is an old interest of mine so when I came upon a book with the intriguing title ‘Touch and Intimacy in the First World War I picked it up at once. The writer had an Indian-sounding name, Santanu Das, but I had never heard of him before. The book’s first chapter [...]

Journey to the ‘Heart of Whiteness’

  [The text and photographs below were sent to me by Santanu Das: they are posted here with his permission.]   A turban used by an Indian Sepoy   Of all the colonies of the European empires, British India contributed the highest number of men, estimated around one and half million men (including both combatants [...]

Journey to the ‘Heart of Whiteness’

          [The text and photographs below were sent to me by Santanu Das: they are posted here with his permission.]           Of all the colonies of the European empires, British India contributed the highest number of men, estimated around one and half million men (including both combatants [...]

‘Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature’

    First World War writing is an old interest of mine so when I came upon a book with the intriguing title     ‘Touch and Intimacy in the First World War I picked it up at once. The writer had an Indian-sounding name, Santanu Das, but I had never heard of him before. [...]