ABSTRACT
Undivided India (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma) contributed to the First World War more than one million men, including combatants and non-combatants, who fought in places as far-flung as France, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, East Africa, Egypt, Palestine and Central Asia. But these peasant-warriors have largely been deleted from the annals of ‘Great War and modern memory’ which till recently had remained Eurocentric. But how do we write the lives of men who were largely non-literate and did not leave us with the super-abundance of diaries, memoirs, poems and journals? Based on intensive archival research, this article unearths a variety of material sources – trench artefacts, mutilated letters and sound-recordings – not only to recover the sensuous world of the Indian sepoys but to ask for a reconceptualisation of the nature of lifewriting with its hitherto textual bias. The article at once challenges the colour of war memory and conventional ways of reading – and writing – lives in times of war.
