Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. xxi, 372 pp. (Tables, B&W photos.) US$59.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-752558-6.
Of the 1.4 million Indians who served in World War I, over 550,000 were non-combatant labourers. Radhika Singha tells their story in a book that brings together labour history, military history and imperial history. Her book is transregional, covering the interconnected geographies of South Asia, Mesopotamia, France, and beyond, with particular attention to the role of military labour on imperial and military frontiers. She lays out the imperial and social dimensions of the understudied military domain of logistics. Taking her cue from scholarship on the ethnic and caste identities of the so-called martial races, she shows how Indian military labour both reflected and disrupted the Raj’s carefully constructed cultural hierarchies and boundaries. As well as the sources allow, she covers the organization and experiences of military labour, and the representational practices associated with them in official discourse and in the Indian and British public spheres. Her final chapter traces the drawn-out process of demobilization and the place (or rather absence) of Indian military labourers in nationalist thinking. Singha’s approach is detailed and archival. While she takes her themes from subaltern studies and war and society scholars, among others, her book is very much a history. It is rich and full of its subject matter, but relatively less concerned with comparative context or concept development.
The colonial authorities in India faced challenges in mobilizing labour on such a scale. They wanted to maintain the idea that Indian labour was “free,” as opposed to indentured or otherwise forced, while also raising unprecedented numbers for distant, dangerous, and arduous service. They had to create status categories for labourers, and negotiate conditions of service with them and with the officials who managed them. Both British officialdom and nationalist India, if in different ways, were invested in notions of high-status Indian soldiers. Military labour, recruited from those marked as suitable for menial work—low caste, tribal, untouchable, criminal, etc.—had to be distinguished from the combatants of the martial races. Managing and deploying these labourers among other colonized or metropolitan populations posed contradictions and played upon Orientalist fears. Pitching India against the Ottoman Caliphate stressed the British Empire’s carefully cultivated image as guardian of its Muslim populations. Meanwhile, Arabs and Ottomans feared the Middle East would be governed from Delhi after the war, creating yet other problems for British authorities deploying large numbers of Indian personnel in that region.
The above gives some sense of the terrain that Singha’s text ably maps and navigates. She has an eye for the quirks of colonial governmentality. After creating a small Jail Porter and Labour Corps to meet manpower demands, officials came up with the idea of a “Convict Legion” (100). Never realized in practice, it was to be modeled on the French Foreign Legion and designed to demonstrate modern penal techniques of reform. Unlike the unfree labour of the Jail Corps, most Indian military labourers, enrolled as they were in the Indian Army, could not be flogged without courts martial. They and many of their leaders advocated for better terms of service, living conditions, and remuneration, threatening the status boundaries between labourer and soldier. As in the combatant parts of the Indian Army in both world wars, mass mobilization led to increasing concerns with efficiency. Processes of rationalization worked to undercut the hierarchies and carefully cultivated categories of person around which the Raj’s legitimacy revolved, a subject Singha attends to in her afterword.
As a history, there is little to fault or find issue with in Singha’s carefully researched text with its lively prose and suitably ironic voice. She does relatively little, however, to situate her subject in larger context. She makes some good references to work on the use of Chinese labour in France (see Xu Guoqi, China and the Great War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, ch. 4 for an overview). But other imperial and military labour organizations in World War I are more or less invisible, along with their political and social contexts. Her book reflects what might be called the “Indocentrism” of much postcolonial scholarship, less forgivable after decades of new imperial history. All of the major combatants in World War I were empires and faced the bottomless demands of modern war for military labourers. Another contrast is provided by the Jim Crow army of the United States, which sought to utilize its African-American manpower in mostly non-combatant capacities. The deep interconnections between military service and full citizenship posed ever more acute problems for major powers in an era of mass mediated public spheres in colonies and metropoles alike, a dynamic which would play out in India in the decades after the war and come to a head in World War II. A final absent scholarly context worth mentioning is the new military history, which seeks to bring a social and cultural perspective to the events and relations found in the war zones. It will be for other scholars to explore the implications of Singha’s exceptional history for these literatures.
Tarak Barkawi
London School of Economics and Political Science, London