‘I spit in the face of patriotism’
ChrestomatherWithin a few months of arriving in Iraq, Captain Kalyan Mukherji had arrived at a devastatingly clear summation of the war. On October 20, 1915, in al-Aziziya, he…
Iraq 1915: ‘A river of blood… why this bloodshed?’
All of Kalyan Mukherji’s letters from Mesopotamia are reproduced in Kalyan-Pradeep. For the most part they are short, hurried and matter of fact. But some of them,…
At Home and the World in Iraq 1915-17: part 2
The tension between the voices of the grandmother and the military historian runs through the length of Mokkhoda-debi’s Kalyan-Pradeep. It is reflected even in the form of the…
The ‘Home and the World’ in Iraq 1915-17: Part 1
Mokkhoda (Mokshada) Debi’s Kalyan Pradeep, (published 1928)is, in essence, the author's tribute, as a grandmother, to her daughter’s son, Kalyan, who was a casualty of the…
From Iraq 1915-17: Lost Treasures of Indian Writing
Race, Empire and First World War Writing (ed. Santanu Das, Cambridge University Press, 2011) is an ambitious collection: it attempts to cover the whole spectrum of non-European…
‘When the War Began We Heard of Several Kings’
Among recent publications on the Indian role in the First World War, one of the most important is a collection entitled When the War Began We Heard of…
‘Indian Voices of the Great War’
The last few years have seen a long-overdue awakening of interest in the Indian soldiers and auxiliaries who participated in the First World War (it goes without…
‘Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature’
First World War writing is an old interest of mine so when I came upon a book with the intriguing title 'Touch and Intimacy in the First World War I…
Journey to the ‘Heart of Whiteness’
A turban used by an Indian Sepoy Of all the colonies of the European empires, British India contributed the highest number of men, estimated around one and…