ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches the involvement of Bengalis as a race in the Great War. It unearths secret intelligence files, newspaper reports and personal memoirs to understand the dynamics of a community’s racial identity during the war. Inspired by war propaganda, Bengali civil society mobilised support to raise an ambulance corps in 1915 and a battalion in 1916 to serve at the Mesopotamian front. Mrinalini Sinha has demonstrated that since the late nineteenth century, the colonial cliche ‘effeminate Bengali’ was a set of racial and cultural investment in colonial masculinity that permeated through colonial policies and colonial culture in general. The Great War witnessed a re-enactment of congealed cultural attitudes towards masculinity. The Indian National Congress and its leaders, like Mahatma Gandhi, supported the empire’s war effort to gain better representation of India in the British government following the war, whereas, in Bengal, the encouragement to join the war was meant to glorify Bengali masculinity and the loyalty of the bhadralog.
