ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the response of the people of Northeast frontier of India to the Great War, which can be described as mixed. The Great War had broken the horizon of the village worldview in many ways. Theiriat, a sleepy remote village in the Lushai Hills, for instance, was one of the hill villages in the region which the Great War had shattered their worldview. Through the incredible tongue of the village retailers, the villagers heard about the deadly tanks, artilleries , fighter bombers, bombs, poison gas and submarines. The Assam government offered 8,000 men after consulting the district officers who had, through some local associates, expressed confidence to recruit that number of labourers. In Lushai Hills, Sainghinga also noted that ‘several elderly men and women strongly expressed the opinion that they would never allow their children to be sent to die’.
