ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the Mesopotamian campaign as having larger implications for India within the imperial imagination in the age of total war. It focuses on diverges from Priya Satia's detailed cultural history of the British intelligence community's knowledge-gathering work in the Middle East during the Great War and the interwar years. The First World War thus reshaped a number of contexts within which India was reimagined and imperial authority and identity recrafted in British discourse and practice. The British path to a reimagined India thus ran through the shattered landscape of Mesopotamia and the Middle East, c. 1914–1917, through the terrain of combat, siege, injury and death. The prolonged hostilities in the region generated oversimplified analyses claiming that “the rise of a new British Empire in the Middle East was more important” than India and that India was a “liability.”
