The present article aims to contribute to the global history of the First World War and the history of ‘imperial humanitarianism’ by taking stock of the Indian Young Men's Christian Association's Army Work schemes in South Asia, Europe and the Middle East The outbreak of the war was hailed by some American secretaries of the YMCA working in India as presenting overwhelming opportunities for their proselytising agenda Indeed, the global conflict massively enlarged the organisation's range of activities among European soldiers stationed in South Asia and for the first time extended it to the ‘Sepoys’, ie Indian and Nepalese soldiers serving in the imperial army Financially supported by the Indian public as well as by the governments of Britain and British India, the US-dominated Indian YMCA embarked on large-scale ‘army work’ programmes in the Indian subcontinent as well as in several theatres of war almost from the outset, a fact that clearly boosted its general popularity This articl

‘Unparalleled Opportunities’: The Indian Y.M.C.A.'s Army Work Schemes for Imperial Troops During the Great War (1914–1920)

Based on ten years of research, Santanu Das's India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs recovers the sensuous experience of combatants, non-combatants and civilians from undivided India in the 1914–1918 conflict and their socio-cultural, visual, and literary worlds. Around 1.5 million Indians were recruited, of whom over a million served abroad. Das draws on a variety of fresh, unusual sources - objects, images, rumours, streetpamphlets, letters, diaries, sound-recordings, folksongs, testimonies, poetry, essays, and fiction - to produce the first cultural and literary history, moving from recruitment tactics in villages through sepoy traces and feelings in battlefields, hospitals, and POW camps to post-war reflections on Europe and empire. Combining archival excavation in different countries across several continents with investigative readings of Gandhi, Kipling, Iqbal, Naidu, Nazrul, Tagore, and Anand, this imaginative study opens up the worlds of sepoys and labourers, men and women, nationalists, artists, and intellectuals, trying to make sense of home and the world in times of war.

India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs

This article analyses a Muslim missive, which was circulated in German East Africa in 1908. Erroneously dubbed the “Mecca letter”, it called believers to repentance and sparked a religious revival, which alarmed the German administration. Their primarily political interpretation of the letter was retained in subsequent scholarship, which has overlooked two important textual resources for a better understanding of the missive: the presence of similar letters elsewhere and the fourteen copies still available in the Tanzanian National Archive. Presenting the first text-critical edition of the letter, together with a historical introduction of the extant specimens and a textual comparison to similar missives elsewhere, the article argues that the East African “Mecca letter” of 1908 was nothing more than a local circulation of a global chain letter. As such, its rapid transmission was not connected to a single political agency, but was likely prompted by a large variety of motivations.

Religion, politics and an apocryphal admonition: the German East African “Mecca letter” of 1908 in historical-critical analysis

At the beginning of the 20 th century, in the years encompassing the First World War, diverging views on colonial rule and securing self-rule were spreading in the Indian subcontinent. When the First World War broke out, many leading revolutionaries encouraged allegiance to the British in their war effort as a means of proving capability for self-rule. Nevertheless, among Indians from different social classes, allegiances were mitigated or reified according to various situations that arose, including the treatment of Indians under British command on the battlefield and official British attitudes towards the Ottoman Caliphate before and after the war. By examining the life work of Dr. Mukhtar Ansari, who led a medical mission from India to the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars, and that of the Indian sepoys in Mesopotamia in 1915-1916, this paper explores the changed and bargained allegiances affected by religious, ethnic, and colonial contexts.

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Altered Allegiances: Indian Soldiers, Non-Combatants, and Revolutionaries during the Balkan and First World Wars

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Global Religious History as a Rhizome: Colonial Panics and Political Islam in German East Africa

The arrival of Indian sipahis (or ‘sepoys’) to fight alongside soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force in France in October 1914 was both a victory and a source of concern for the British Raj. It proved to be the zenith of martial race fantasies that had been carefully codified from the 1890s, and birthed fears about the effects that Europe and the rapidly intensifying conflict on the Western Front would have upon the ‘best black troops in the world’. The situation resulted in the appointment of a special military censor to examine the letters sent to and from Indian sipahis and compile a fortnightly summary of Indian letters from France for the duration of the First World War. This paper investigates a portion of the letters contained in these reports. More particularly, it investigates the life of a single chain letter and the effect its chiliastic message had upon Muslim troops of the Indian Army during the First World War. As the letter was read, rewritten, and passed on, it served as a rejoinder to missionary efforts by the Ahmadiyya Movement, reinterpreted as a call for soldiers to purify their own bodies and oppose interracial sexual relationships, before, finally, being used as a critique of the British war effort against the Ottoman empire.

Gajendra Singh

Papers

Throwing Snowballs in France: Muslim sipahis of the Indian Army and Sheikh Ahmad's dream, 1915–1918