India's great war

One hundred years ago, the world’s guns fell silent after four years of hell. It is impossible, they say, to adequately understand what the guns of the Western Front sounded, and felt, like. The combatants hurled millions of shells at each other a week; during the fearsome artillery barrages that preceded an offensive, sympathetic vibrations were felt in England. It nearly wiped out a generation in Western Europe; when the British author Arthur Mee (familiar to some of us, perhaps, as the editor of the old ‘Children’s Encyclopaedia’) wrote about what he called England’s “thankful villages”, which had lost nobody in World War I, he could only identify 35 in the entire country. 

Nor was the devastation limited to Europe. This was a war between empires. East Africa, for example, was devastated by battles between the Germans in what is now Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi, and the British in Kenya and modern Zimbabwe — as well as the Belgians in the Congo and the Portuguese in Mozambique. A million Africans were conscripted by the British as “carriers”; in East Africa, a fifth of them died, as compared to less than 10 per cent of the regular British or Indian soldiers. Entire villages lost all their men; famine came in 1917-18; between 10 and 20 per cent of the entire population of East Africa died. 

In India, we have been somewhat quiet about a war in which a million of our soldiers fought, and 75,000 died. We choose to imagine this was someone else’s war. Perhaps. But that is a foolish way of looking at it. After all, the war’s causes and motives were distant from everyone, not just Indians. The average European soldier in the First World War was as disconnected to the complex geopolitical causes of the war as the average Indian soldier. Yet we have so erased this war from our national memory that we have chosen to minimise it, to distance ourselves from it, by building a “new” war memorial next to India Gate — a saddening insult to that magnificent memorial to the Indians who died in the world wars and since. 

Here is just one reason why the Great War still matters to us: When it ended, it took with it one of the great architectures of governance, and one that we sorely miss today. Not all empires were fashioned the same way. The French empire was homogenising, the Portuguese diffident, the British commercialised. Yet the two that vanished as real entities after the end of the First World War — Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empire — were different in a very particular way. They were truly multi-national states. The Hapsburg emperor in Vienna or the Sultan in Istanbul may have had an ethnicity of their own — though figuring out exactly what the Hapsburgs would require a really weird mathematical model — but the imperial polities and bureaucracies they supervised were multi-ethnic and multi-national. It was this very refusal to accept nationalism that weakened both empires in the years before the War — and which in fact sparked the War. It was this multi-national power that those two empires were fighting to preserve. When they died and were dissected into the patchwork of states that lie unquiet across West Asia and Eastern Europe today, it passed into common wisdom that you had to be one nation to be a functional state. Most of us in India have worked for 70 years on that hypothesis. Perhaps if we had had an alternative vision to draw from, some of the mistakes that assumption led us into would have been avoided. 

If it is accepted as true that you have to be one nation to be a functional state, then it follows that all nations must have their own states. Many imperial subjects thought that was what they were fighting for: what the then president in Washington, Woodrow Wilson, would have called “self-determination”. But the victorious empires failed to understand what they had been fighting about, and what war they had actually won. The Wilsonian moment of possibility — when anti-colonial leaders from Africa to India to Indochina hoped for greater say in their own states — collapsed into the anger of rebellion and non-cooperation. Without the hopes raised by World War I, there would have been no Jallianwala Bagh. Without the expectations granted by collaboration during the war, the leaders of the Indian nationalist movement might have remained “moderates” much longer.

What we are today in this country is a product of the choices that marked the First World War. And the troubles in the rest of the world — extremism in an Islamic world without a caliph, the rise of hyper-nationalism in Europe, and so on — are also born of the same conflagration. 

So, as you drink your tea, pause to remember the tens of millions who died between 1914 and 1918. Nothing would be more fitting. For, after all, the habit of tea-drinking was itself introduced to North India by soldiers returning from the front. In a thousand ways, small and great, the First World War is still with us. 

Email: m.s.sharma@gmail.com; Twitter: @mihirssharma