ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the memory of Indian sepoys in the First World War, as represented by Kamila Shamsie in her 2014 novel A God in Every Stone. The chapter discusses the war experience of the Pashtun protagonist, Qayyum, in France and Belgium, focusing on the power of his imperial loyalties and his painful disillusionment with Western modernity. It retraces the protagonist’s further desertion from the ideology of martial races upon his return to India and shows how he evolves to condemn all violence as a result of the ordeal he suffered in Europe. Central to the discussion of Qayyum’s transformation is the non-violent philosophy of Khudai Khidmatgar, a Pashtun anti-colonial movement led by Abdul Ghaffar Khan, which the author approaches in terms of decolonial insurgency. Finally, Branach-Kallas reads the novel as consonant with Ariella Azoulay’s conception of potential history, which undermines the radical divisions enforced by imperialism between oppressed peoples, objects and legacies of violence.
