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Race, Empire and First World War Writing

Race, Empire and the First World War brings together for the first time an international cast of scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine the racial and colonial aspects of the First World War in a comparative and interdisciplinary framework. It has been reviewed widely, including in the TLS, Textual Practice, Historical Workshop Journal and Journal of British Studies.

Das' contribution comprised a 13,000-word introduction (pp. 1-32) and a 8000 word chapter (70-89). The introduction draws on fresh archival and historical material to investigate the extent of colonial participation with extensive statistics, argues for the necessity of a comparative and interdisciplinary approach and has original research on the contested meanings of ‘race’ and ‘colour’ at the time.

His own chapter ‘Indians at home, Mesopotamia and France 1914-1918: towards an intimate history’ recovers the Indian war experience through extensive archival research in Europe, Australia and India and an interdisciplinary methodology. It recovers, translates and analyses a number hitherto unknown but key texts, including the only Mesopotamia diary by an Indian POW (the Mesopotamia debacle involved 12,000 Indians) and a series of letters of an Indian doctor who served and died there, and examines them alongside Indian war poetry, songs and censored letters by the Indian sepoys and argues for a ‘palimpsestic’ mode of reading.

The book is part of his research into the colonial and racial dimensions of the First World War, and the chapter on India has now developed into a monograph India, Empire and the First world War: Objects, Images and Words, under contract with CUP.