Output details
29 - English Language and Literature
King's College London
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.