History books tell us that the First World War started in 1914 and went on till 1918. But what if this was not the first such war to be fought on Earth? A study has revealed that the first war to be fought on such a massive scale took place some 32 centuries ago.&nbsp;

It comprised a series of conflicts across much of Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East. Two strong armies from two different parts of Europe engaged in a battle just south of the Baltic Sea. At least 400 miles of land separated their homes - &nbsp;with one coming from Bavaria (current Czech Republic) and a northern one from what is now north-east Germany.

Over 2,000 soldiers fought the epic war which was triggered by a series of conflicts and crises. There was chaos in several parts of the world and everything, from Scandinavia to the Sahara and from Western Europe to today's Iraq, was affected.&nbsp;

The new findings have been published in the UK-based academic journal, Antiquity.

It was fought in the valley of the River Tollense around 1250 BC.

The period was fraught with political turmoil with several major empires reaching their demise.&nbsp;

This included the fall of the first great Greek civilisation (the Mycenaeans) from around 1230 BC, the collapse of the Middle East’s Hittite empire in the 1190s BC, the weakening of ancient Egypt from around 1180 BC, and the decline of Babylon by 1155 BC.

Also Read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/120-million-year-old-part-of-earth-lost-since-break-up-of-pangea-discovered-760618">120-million-year-old part of Earth lost since break up of Pangea discovered</a>

This is also when the final 13th century BC collapse of the Indus Valley civilisation happened. Major political centres in Romania, Hungary and northern Serbia also declined in the 12th century.&nbsp;

<h2>Proof of the war</h2>

A likely proof of the major conflict is the construction of defensive ramparts in Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia, and as far west as Ireland in the 13th century.&nbsp;

Archaeologists have found proof that the battle was not only the earliest known major battle in Europe but was fought on a much larger scale than previously thought. The remains of 160 warriors have been found so far, despite only a tiny fraction of the battlefield being excavated.&nbsp;

Around 54 bronze arrowheads have also been found, which align with the injuries on the bodies of the soldiers as most of them are believed to have been killed by them.

Another proof of the war was the two types of arrows found - one from north-east Germany, the other from southern Germany or from Bohemia or Moravia in what is now the Czech Republic.

“Our study of this battlefield completely changes our understanding of Bronze Age society,” prehistorian Professor Thomas Terberger of the University of Göttingen, a co-author of today’s Antiquity paper, said.

“Our investigations have been revealing the unexpected scale and level of military and political organisation in that period,” he added.

History books tell us that the First World War started in 1914 and went on till 1918. But what if this was not the first such war to be fought on Earth? A study has revealed that the first war to be fought on such a massive scale took place some 32 centuries ago.

History books tell us that the First World War started in 1914 and went on till 1918. But what if this was not the first such war to be fought on Earth? A study has revealed that the first war to be fought on such a massive scale took place some 32 centuries ago. It comprised a series of conflicts across much of Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East. Two strong armies from two different parts of Europe engaged in a battle just south of the Baltic Sea. At least 400 miles of land separated their homes - with one coming from Bavaria (current Czech Republic) and a northern one from what is now north-east Germany. Over 2,000 soldiers fought the epic war which was triggered by a series of conflicts and crises. There was chaos in several parts of the world and everything, from Scandinavia to the Sahara and from Western Europe to today's Iraq, was affected. The new findings have been published in the UK-based academic journal, Antiquity. It was fought in the valley of the River Tollense around 1250 BC. The period was fraught with political turmoil with several major empires reaching their demise. This included the fall of the first great Greek civilisation (the Mycenaeans) from around 1230 BC, the collapse of the Middle East’s Hittite empire in the 1190s BC, the weakening of ancient Egypt from around 1180 BC, and the decline of Babylon by 1155 BC. Also Read: 120-million-year-old part of Earth lost since break up of Pangea discovered This is also when the final 13th century BC collapse of the Indus Valley civilisation happened. Major political centres in Romania, Hungary and northern Serbia also declined in the 12th century. Proof of the war A likely proof of the major conflict is the construction of defensive ramparts in Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia, and as far west as Ireland in the 13th century. Archaeologists have found proof that the battle was not only the earliest known major battle in Europe but was fought on a much larger scale than previously thought. The remains of 160 warriors have been found so far, despite only a tiny fraction of the battlefield being excavated. Around 54 bronze arrowheads have also been found, which align with the injuries on the bodies of the soldiers as most of them are believed to have been killed by them. Another proof of the war was the two types of arrows found - one from north-east Germany, the other from southern Germany or from Bohemia or Moravia in what is now the Czech Republic. “Our study of this battlefield completely changes our understanding of Bronze Age society,” prehistorian Professor Thomas Terberger of the University of Göttingen, a co-author of today’s Antiquity paper, said. “Our investigations have been revealing the unexpected scale and level of military and political organisation in that period,” he added.

First real World War was fought not in 1914 but way back in 1250 BC

Over a century ago, <a href="https://www.cwgc.org/find-records/find-war-dead/casualty-details/539693/kapur-singh/">Sepoy Kapur Singh</a> of 69th Punjabis regiment of erstwhile British Indian Army left his home in Ambala town in&nbsp;northern India. Sepoy Kapur, husband of Asa Dai, did not return home. Like Sepoy Kapur Singh, <a href="https://www.cwgc.org/find-records/find-war-dead/casualty-details/2913500/deb-sing-bisht/">Rifleman Deb Sing Bisht</a> of 39th Garhwal Rifles from Chamoli town of present-day Uttarakhand did not return home either.

<img alt="Indian soldiers who died in France" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="3e42a004-957f-46a9-9328-3d279b5e4dff" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Untitled%20design%20-%202023-07-15T015429.610.png" />

&nbsp;

Rifleman Deb Sing Bisht's memorial stone at Neuville-Sous-Montreuil Indian Cemetery,&nbsp;in Pas-de-Calais, France | Commonwealth War Grave Commission

Sepoy Kapur Singh and&nbsp;Rifleman Deb Singh Bisht themselves lived under colonial rule. But on French land during the first world war, they fought to keep democratic values of Equality, Liberty and Fraternity alive — laying their lives for the modern democratic values alien to their homeland at the time.&nbsp;<img alt="First World War | Paris | Indian troops" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="e424f8e2-571b-41a5-90ab-6a0743b26f3a" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Untitled%20design%20-%202023-07-15T020347.011.png" />

One of the seminal pictures of World War-I&nbsp;is that of a French woman greeting Indian Sikh soldiers in Paris in 1916 at a site not far from Bastille Day's Celebrations on July 14, 2023 where India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the guest of honour | Toor Collection

About 1.4 million Indian soldiers served during World War-I, of which 1,40,000 battled in the north of France and Belgium. Over 74,000 soldiers from the Indian subcontinent laid their lives during the five-year period between 1914 to 1919, of which 7,000 were killed on their line of duties in France and Belgium – paying the ultimate price in a foreign, unknown land.&nbsp;

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1916 to 2023 
 
Solidarity, Friendship &amp; Spirit endure.....<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/BastilleDay?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#BastilleDay</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/IndiaFranceFriendship?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#IndiaFranceFriendship</a> <a href="https://t.co/sH2OkozhjV">pic.twitter.com/sH2OkozhjV</a>
— ADG PI - INDIAN ARMY (@adgpi) <a href="https://twitter.com/adgpi/status/1679843217553121280?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 14, 2023</a></blockquote>
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After India’s freedom from the British, while the centre of power in New Delhi came to be symbolised by the monumental sandstone arch built by the British in the memory of troops who died in the first world war, in France – until recently – the mainstream awareness about Indians who died protecting French lands during the first world war was scarce.

This has changed in recent years.&nbsp;

<img alt="India Gate" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="5d4190d1-e54b-445e-a038-3da95d78ed59" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Untitled%20design%20-%202023-07-15T021035.226.png" />

India Gate,&nbsp;originally called All-India War Memorial, is a sandstone arch in New Delhi, dedicated to the troops of British India who laid their lives during first world war | AFP

At a war memorial of Neuve-Chapelle, in the north of France, the names of fallen soldiers hint upon their Indian origins – just like the ones whose names are engraved on India Gate.&nbsp;

Commemorative ceremonies are now held to honour the sacrifices made by the Indians who died while saving France from falling into German hands.&nbsp;

For the last three decades, Ramesh Chander Vohra, 75, founder and president of Interfaith Shaheedi Commemoration Association (IFSC) has been spending his savings and later his pension funds to commemorate the sacrifices of Indians who died protecting France in the twentieth century.&nbsp;

In the 2010s, the governments of France, the United States and various European countries planned numerous military ceremonies to celebrate the centenary of victory in the former battlefields of first world war. The Indian soldiers were the great forgotten in these ceremonies, Vohra noted.

On August 30, 2015, Vohra organised an interfaith prayer at the Neuve-Chapelle Indian Memorial site, attended by over a dozen local mayors.

Vedic mantras, verses from the Koran, Shabads of Shri Granth Sahib and Christian psalms were&nbsp;chanted in for the peace of departed souls of the Indian soldiers of diverse religious backgrounds.&nbsp;<img alt="Vohra image" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="836441ee-f55c-4132-9512-4b43eefd1b2b" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Untitled%20design%20-%202023-07-15T031510.573.png" />

Ramesh Chandra Vohra (Centre) during the interfaith prayer at the Neuve-Chapelle Indian Memorial site on August 30, 2015 | By special arrangement

"The French culture as a whole recognises and respects their contributions, fostering a sense of gratitude and remembrance," Vohra told WION.&nbsp;

"I have even purchased land next to the Neuve Chapelle monument and aim to put up a statue in the memory of their gallant contribution," he added.&nbsp;

On Friday, 107 years after they first marched on French streets during a victory parade after saving France from falling into German hands, the Indian troops marched into Paris again.

The Indian tri-services contingent added spectacle to Bastille Day Parade, marching down the tree-lined Champs-Elysee avenue, wowing the crowd in the French capital — Ramesh Chandra Vohra one among them.

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Marching together towards a forever friendship…<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/IndianArmedForces?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#IndianArmedForces</a> contingent displayed immaculate and synchronised drill movements at the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/BastilleDay?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#BastilleDay</a> celebrations in <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/France?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#France</a>. The participation of the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/IndianArmy?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#IndianArmy</a> contingent in the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/FrenchNationalDay?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#FrenchNationalDay</a> celebrations reinforces the… <a href="https://t.co/3vv6jRt1Qx">pic.twitter.com/3vv6jRt1Qx</a>
— ADG PI - INDIAN ARMY (@adgpi) <a href="https://twitter.com/adgpi/status/1679862966886502400?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 14, 2023</a></blockquote>
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According to historian-filmmaker Vijay Singh's 2016-film 'Farewell My Indian Soldier', the letters sent home by Indian soldiers were full of praises for the French.&nbsp;For the French people in Somme region, the Indian battalions were perceived as liberators who had left their tropical country to face the cold for&nbsp;their aid.

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Indian soldiers at Champs-Élysées at the military parade of July 14, 1916. At the time this snapshot, the Battle of the Somme, in which the Indian Expeditionary Force (IEF) were fighting, had already begun. This was given as a gift by Prez Macron to PM Modi. <a href="https://t.co/FQbcGvIccv">https://t.co/FQbcGvIccv</a> <a href="https://t.co/26ZtPty9s6">pic.twitter.com/26ZtPty9s6</a>
— Sidhant Sibal (@sidhant) <a href="https://twitter.com/sidhant/status/1679801790156374017?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 14, 2023</a></blockquote>
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A soldier's letter was quoted as saying by an article authored by Singh for The Indian Express in 2019: "Over here, marriage is never under 18 and by consent of both the parties. No man can beat his wife. This injustice happens only in India! Man and woman live together in harmony."&nbsp;

Another soldier noted that French girls came out on streets when Indian cavalrymen were trasferred out of a village. A placard read: "Indian soldiers are departing. Mademoiselle France pleure! Miss France is in tears!"

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Over a century ago, Sepoy Kapur Singh of 69th Punjabis regiment of erstwhile British Indian Army left his home in Ambala town in northern India. Sepoy Kapur, husband of Asa Dai, did not return home.

Over a century ago, Sepoy Kapur Singh of 69th Punjabis regiment of erstwhile British Indian Army left his home in Ambala town in northern India. Sepoy Kapur, husband of Asa Dai, did not return home. Like Sepoy Kapur Singh, Rifleman Deb Sing Bisht of 39th Garhwal Rifles from Chamoli town of present-day Uttarakhand did not return home either. Rifleman Deb Sing Bisht's memorial stone at Neuville-Sous-Montreuil Indian Cemetery, in Pas-de-Calais, France | Commonwealth War Grave Commission Sepoy Kapur Singh and Rifleman Deb Singh Bisht themselves lived under colonial rule. But on French land during the first world war, they fought to keep democratic values of Equality, Liberty and Fraternity alive — laying their lives for the modern democratic values alien to their homeland at the time. One of the seminal pictures of World War-I is that of a French woman greeting Indian Sikh soldiers in Paris in 1916 at a site not far from Bastille Day's Celebrations on July 14, 2023 where India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the guest of honour | Toor Collection About 1.4 million Indian soldiers served during World War-I, of which 1,40,000 battled in the north of France and Belgium. Over 74,000 soldiers from the Indian subcontinent laid their lives during the five-year period between 1914 to 1919, of which 7,000 were killed on their line of duties in France and Belgium – paying the ultimate price in a foreign, unknown land. 1916 to 2023 Solidarity, Friendship & Spirit endure.....#BastilleDay #IndiaFranceFriendship pic.twitter.com/sH2OkozhjV — ADG PI - INDIAN ARMY (@adgpi) July 14, 2023 × After India’s freedom from the British, while the centre of power in New Delhi came to be symbolised by the monumental sandstone arch built by the British in the memory of troops who died in the first world war, in France – until recently – the mainstream awareness about Indians who died protecting French lands during the first world war was scarce. This has changed in recent years. India Gate, originally called All-India War Memorial, is a sandstone arch in New Delhi, dedicated to the troops of British India who laid their lives during first world war | AFP At a war memorial of Neuve-Chapelle, in the north of France, the names of fallen soldiers hint upon their Indian origins – just like the ones whose names are engraved on India Gate. Commemorative ceremonies are now held to honour the sacrifices made by the Indians who died while saving France from falling into German hands. For the last three decades, Ramesh Chander Vohra, 75, founder and president of Interfaith Shaheedi Commemoration Association (IFSC) has been spending his savings and later his pension funds to commemorate the sacrifices of Indians who died protecting France in the twentieth century. In the 2010s, the governments of France, the United States and various European countries planned numerous military ceremonies to celebrate the centenary of victory in the former battlefields of first world war. The Indian soldiers were the great forgotten in these ceremonies, Vohra noted. On August 30, 2015, Vohra organised an interfaith prayer at the Neuve-Chapelle Indian Memorial site, attended by over a dozen local mayors. Vedic mantras, verses from the Koran, Shabads of Shri Granth Sahib and Christian psalms were chanted in for the peace of departed souls of the Indian soldiers of diverse religious backgrounds. Ramesh Chandra Vohra (Centre) during the interfaith prayer at the Neuve-Chapelle Indian Memorial site on August 30, 2015 | By special arrangement "The French culture as a whole recognises and respects their contributions, fostering a sense of gratitude and remembrance," Vohra told WION. "I have even purchased land next to the Neuve Chapelle monument and aim to put up a statue in the memory of their gallant contribution," he added. On Friday, 107 years after they first marched on French streets during a victory parade after saving France from falling into German hands, the Indian troops marched into Paris again. The Indian tri-services contingent added spectacle to Bastille Day Parade, marching down the tree-lined Champs-Elysee avenue, wowing the crowd in the French capital — Ramesh Chandra Vohra one among them. Marching together towards a forever friendship…#IndianArmedForces contingent displayed immaculate and synchronised drill movements at the #BastilleDay celebrations in #France. The participation of the #IndianArmy contingent in the #FrenchNationalDay celebrations reinforces the… pic.twitter.com/3vv6jRt1Qx — ADG PI - INDIAN ARMY (@adgpi) July 14, 2023 × According to historian-filmmaker Vijay Singh's 2016-film 'Farewell My Indian Soldier', the letters sent home by Indian soldiers were full of praises for the French. For the French people in Somme region, the Indian battalions were perceived as liberators who had left their tropical country to face the cold for their aid. Indian soldiers at Champs-Élysées at the military parade of July 14, 1916. At the time this snapshot, the Battle of the Somme, in which the Indian Expeditionary Force (IEF) were fighting, had already begun. This was given as a gift by Prez Macron to PM Modi. https://t.co/FQbcGvIccv pic.twitter.com/26ZtPty9s6 — Sidhant Sibal (@sidhant) July 14, 2023 × A soldier's letter was quoted as saying by an article authored by Singh for The Indian Express in 2019: "Over here, marriage is never under 18 and by consent of both the parties. No man can beat his wife. This injustice happens only in India! Man and woman live together in harmony." Another soldier noted that French girls came out on streets when Indian cavalrymen were trasferred out of a village. A placard read: "Indian soldiers are departing. Mademoiselle France pleure! Miss France is in tears!" WATCH WION LIVE HERE You can now write for wionews.com and be a part of the community. Share your stories and opinions with us here.

Cast From The Past: Indians who died protecting France during first World War

The world this year is observing 100 years of the end of the First World War, which was virtually unprecedented in the slaughter, carnage, and destruction it caused. The war shifted the balance of power in the world and was one of the great watersheds of 20th-century geopolitical history.

Santanu Das, historian and professor of English Literature at London's King's College, has recovered 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 in his new book 'India, Empire and First World War Culture'. Based on 10 years of research, Das draws on a variety of fresh, unusual sources - objects, images, rumours, street pamphlets, letters, diaries - 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.

Here are the excerpts of his interview with WION:

WION: What have you tried to do in this book?

Professor Das: What I have tried through the dialogue between the range of archival material and the literary is to recover the texture of the experience of these men - their humanity, their vulnerability, their tumultuous world of feeling - and go beyond a version of history sealed in medals and memorials at the same time. At the same time, I have tried to look beyond the story of combatants and non-combatants abroad to embed the conflict in the larger socio-historical and cultural processes in India. From heated debates about what India's war participation might mean for its political future to the recruitment speeches of Mahatma Gandhi, from photographs, testimonies and voice-recordings of the troops to women's folk-songs in Punjab, from fictional representations by Indian and British writers to the imagining of a post-war world by intellectuals such as Mohammed Iqbal and Rabindranath Tagore, the country's involvement in the war, the book claims, produced a distinct and recognisable culture.

'India, Empire and First World War Culture' thus excavates the interwoven lives and cultural forms of several groups of people, including the Indians who served abroad, the people whom they encountered or who represented them, particularly in Europe, Britain and Mesopotamia (present day Irq), and finally men and women back in India. The impulses of the study are both recuperative and analytic. First, it seeks to examine the 'multi-layered cake' that the First World War was in India through a more heterogeneous collection of sources and a capacious lens that takes in both the sepoy and the civilian, the subaltern and the elite. Second, the book is actively interested in processes of representation. It places letters, diaries, memoirs, photographs, art objects, songs and above all literary writings at the centre of the investigation, delves into their formal complexities and show how they allow for a more intimate investigation of issues raised by more conventional historical sources.

WION: What are your key takeaways, observations, and trivia from the exhaustive compilation you delightfully put together in your latest book?

Professor Das: I don't think that the research for any other book that I've written has moved me so far or taken me to such distant places - from the cemetery in Dar Es Salaam and the Australian War Museum in Canberra to the battlefields, barns and monuments in France and Flanders to the recruitment village in Bhondsi in Haryana. 
&nbsp; 
The research is definitely the bedrock and it is a book about the First World War but I also wanted to open up 'history' in fresh ways - both by engaging with unconventional archival sources (blood-stained glasses, lota, folksongs, photographs and paintings, songs of POW sepoys) as well as ask a different set of questions of these material. One of my aims was to try to reach down, beyond research and storytelling, into capturing what I call the 'echoes of the sepoy heart' and access their underworld of feeling - their desires, doubts, fears, homesickness, loneliness or even the sense of wonder - and capture 'history' in all its messiness and complexities and contradictions - palpable, intractable and incorrigibly plural. It is often a collection of fugitive fragments and I wanted to capture their sense of evanescence as well as the breath of warm life on words, images, and tunes.

WION: In an article "Why the Indian soldiers of WW1 were forgotten", author Shashi Tharoor believes "history has mostly forgotten these sacrifices, which were rewarded with broken promises of Indian Independence from the British Government". The contributions of 1.3 million Indian Soldiers served in WW1 is forgotten or not discussed in today's time. Do you agree or disagree?

Professor Das: The Indian soldiers of the First World War have been doomed to wander in the no man's land between the Eurocentric narratives of the ‘Great War and Modern Memory’ on one hand and the nationalist histories of India and Pakistan.

The Indian nationalist leaders, including Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi, supported the war because they thought India's war contribution would be rewarded with greater political autonomy or ‘Swaraj’; instead, we get the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre in April in 1919 in the very province that has contributed the most. So, of course, it is a case of broken promises, and no one has perhaps put it as powerfully as Rabindranath Tagore when he visits the former battlefields of the Western Front in 1923:

"Lately I went to visit some battlefields of France which had been devastated by war. Something of the same sense of oppression in a different degree, the same desolation in a different aspect, is produced in my mind when I realise the effect of the West upon Eastern life – the West which, in its relation to us, is all plan and purpose incarnate, without any superfluous humanity."

I agree with Tharoor that it was a tremendous betrayal - to such an extent that Gandhi, who had helped in recruiting the soldiers in 1918, now calls them, after the Jallinwallah Bagh massacre, 'hired assassins of the Raj'. At the same time, I would say that it was not the only cause: There are other powerful reasons.

In Britain, for example, it’s not military narrative but the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon which form the template of First World War memory. Most of the Indian sepoys were illiterate and did not leave behind the abundance of diaries, letters, testimonies - so how do we recover and remember the experiences of a community for which there are no few archival traces?

Moreover, the sepoys came back home to the febrile nationalist climate of 1919: Gandhi had just united Hindu and Muslim India for the Khilafat movement. In such an atmosphere, no space was created - narrative or political or socio-cultural - to commemorate the sepoys and gradually they were airbrushed out of the histories of both Europe and South Asia.

WION: Can you elaborate on the role of Indian soldiers in WW1 and the socio-economic and cultural impact it had in India then? Also, the men recruited for WW1 were primarily from 'martial races' - any particular reason?

Professor Das: The 'martial race' theory was a colonial construction, cobbled out of social Darwinism, political strategy and indigenous caste structures. It held that men of only particular ethnic and religious groups - Jats, Dogras, Punjabi Mussalmans, Garhwalis, Sikhs and Gurkhas - were 'naturally' martial and masculine and thereby 'fit' to fight. These men were often relatively depoliticised and loyal to the British Raj. The more politically conscious Bengalis were deemed 'effeminate' and the British Indian army obviously did not want any political dissent.

In 1914, India had the largest voluntary army in the world, though a question mark hangs over the word 'voluntary'. For most, soldiering was a source of livelihood. It is not, however, possible to impose a common motive for enlistment of the 6,00,000 combatants. If the First World War soldier is usually flattened into an izzat (prestige)-driven sepoy or a hardened mercenary, we need to find a more socio-culturally and psychologically nuanced vocabulary. Economic necessity or incentive, family and community traditions, an internalised ethos of 'martial races' and the cult of heroic masculinity were all fused and confused, hinting at a complex structure of feeling that went beyond the reductive categories of organic loyalty or mercenary impulse: Instead, what we have is a complex, and at times ambivalent, emotional world where loyalty to one's regiment and comrades would co-exist with reservations against the colonial state.

WION: How did the initial recruitment process start and posting? Give us an additional account on their salary structure, and credentials required during the recruitment process. How was the general sentiment of people as per your findings?

Professor Das: The whole recruitment campaign can be divided into three rough phases: From 1914 to 1916, it was largely 'voluntary', even if propelled by economic incentives; in 1917, we see the beginning of the use of force; and from April to November 1918, it was largely coercion. July 1917 marked a turning point. With a fresh directive to 'double the previous flow of recruits', Punjab was called upon to provide a monthly total of 14,290 fighting men and a punitive quota system was introduced whereby the zaildars, suffered poshes and lambardars were required to raise a certain number of men, through their influence or force.

In the summer of 1918, the Lieutenant-Governor Michael O'Dwyer promised to raise 200,000 men over the coming year. Andrew Thompson, the Chief Secretary to the Punjab Government admitted to a series of coercive measures, from the cutting off of irrigation water supply to levying exorbitant revenues on zails which failed meet the recruitment quota. Indeed, the Congress report on the Punjab disturbances in 1919, widely held to be written by Gandhi, is particularly illuminating. During the summer of 1918, the district officers and local zaildars and lambardars, resorted to a spree of brutal measures: Lists were compiled of families which had more than one son; recruits began to be bought and sold for large amounts of money; farmers who did not offer their sons were denied remission from income tax. The number of men charged with offences or 'challaned' went up by 300% in 1918 and charges were dropped when they enlisted; in Attock and Mianwali, men fled to the North West Frontier province to avoid being recruited; water-supply was cut off to parts of Multan.

The average pay of the sepoy or infantryman was Rs 11 and he received 'batta' or special allowance for foreign or field service; a sowar or cavalryman was paid Rs 14, and an additional Rs 20 for the horse, totalling Rs 34.

WION: This year, global leaders like Antonio Guterres, Angela Merkel, and Emmanuel Macron took to Twitter during the 100th Anniversary of the end of 'The Great War' warned about the dangers of the rise of nationalism without referring to Donald Trump. As a historian what are your observations on the current trend?

Professor Das: Absolutely I cannot agree more. As Tagore famously wrote in Nationalism (1917) - his powerful response to the First World War - it was European belligerent nationalism and rivalry that led to the war, and we have now the frightening spectre of right-wing nationalism across the whole world - and not just in the US. Nationalism, as a political ideology, is very different from one's love for one country, and Tagore called it a demonic force, 'carnivorous', 'soul-destroying’ and 'machine-like' and its climax was the carnage and devastation of the First World War. So it's absolutely essential that we take its lessons.

The world this year is observing 100 years of the end of the First World War, which was virtually unprecedented in the slaughter, carnage, and destruction it caused.

The world this year is observing 100 years of the end of the First World War, which was virtually unprecedented in the slaughter, carnage, and destruction it caused. The war shifted the balance of power in the world and was one of the great watersheds of 20th-century geopolitical history. Santanu Das, historian and professor of English Literature at London's King's College, has recovered 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 in his new book 'India, Empire and First World War Culture'. Based on 10 years of research, Das draws on a variety of fresh, unusual sources - objects, images, rumours, street pamphlets, letters, diaries - 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. Here are the excerpts of his interview with WION: WION: What have you tried to do in this book? Professor Das: What I have tried through the dialogue between the range of archival material and the literary is to recover the texture of the experience of these men - their humanity, their vulnerability, their tumultuous world of feeling - and go beyond a version of history sealed in medals and memorials at the same time. At the same time, I have tried to look beyond the story of combatants and non-combatants abroad to embed the conflict in the larger socio-historical and cultural processes in India. From heated debates about what India's war participation might mean for its political future to the recruitment speeches of Mahatma Gandhi, from photographs, testimonies and voice-recordings of the troops to women's folk-songs in Punjab, from fictional representations by Indian and British writers to the imagining of a post-war world by intellectuals such as Mohammed Iqbal and Rabindranath Tagore, the country's involvement in the war, the book claims, produced a distinct and recognisable culture. 'India, Empire and First World War Culture' thus excavates the interwoven lives and cultural forms of several groups of people, including the Indians who served abroad, the people whom they encountered or who represented them, particularly in Europe, Britain and Mesopotamia (present day Irq), and finally men and women back in India. The impulses of the study are both recuperative and analytic. First, it seeks to examine the 'multi-layered cake' that the First World War was in India through a more heterogeneous collection of sources and a capacious lens that takes in both the sepoy and the civilian, the subaltern and the elite. Second, the book is actively interested in processes of representation. It places letters, diaries, memoirs, photographs, art objects, songs and above all literary writings at the centre of the investigation, delves into their formal complexities and show how they allow for a more intimate investigation of issues raised by more conventional historical sources. WION: What are your key takeaways, observations, and trivia from the exhaustive compilation you delightfully put together in your latest book? Professor Das: I don't think that the research for any other book that I've written has moved me so far or taken me to such distant places - from the cemetery in Dar Es Salaam and the Australian War Museum in Canberra to the battlefields, barns and monuments in France and Flanders to the recruitment village in Bhondsi in Haryana. The research is definitely the bedrock and it is a book about the First World War but I also wanted to open up 'history' in fresh ways - both by engaging with unconventional archival sources (blood-stained glasses, lota, folksongs, photographs and paintings, songs of POW sepoys) as well as ask a different set of questions of these material. One of my aims was to try to reach down, beyond research and storytelling, into capturing what I call the 'echoes of the sepoy heart' and access their underworld of feeling - their desires, doubts, fears, homesickness, loneliness or even the sense of wonder - and capture 'history' in all its messiness and complexities and contradictions - palpable, intractable and incorrigibly plural. It is often a collection of fugitive fragments and I wanted to capture their sense of evanescence as well as the breath of warm life on words, images, and tunes. WION: In an article "Why the Indian soldiers of WW1 were forgotten", author Shashi Tharoor believes "history has mostly forgotten these sacrifices, which were rewarded with broken promises of Indian Independence from the British Government". The contributions of 1.3 million Indian Soldiers served in WW1 is forgotten or not discussed in today's time. Do you agree or disagree? Professor Das: The Indian soldiers of the First World War have been doomed to wander in the no man's land between the Eurocentric narratives of the ‘Great War and Modern Memory’ on one hand and the nationalist histories of India and Pakistan. The Indian nationalist leaders, including Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi, supported the war because they thought India's war contribution would be rewarded with greater political autonomy or ‘Swaraj’; instead, we get the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre in April in 1919 in the very province that has contributed the most. So, of course, it is a case of broken promises, and no one has perhaps put it as powerfully as Rabindranath Tagore when he visits the former battlefields of the Western Front in 1923: "Lately I went to visit some battlefields of France which had been devastated by war. Something of the same sense of oppression in a different degree, the same desolation in a different aspect, is produced in my mind when I realise the effect of the West upon Eastern life – the West which, in its relation to us, is all plan and purpose incarnate, without any superfluous humanity." I agree with Tharoor that it was a tremendous betrayal - to such an extent that Gandhi, who had helped in recruiting the soldiers in 1918, now calls them, after the Jallinwallah Bagh massacre, 'hired assassins of the Raj'. At the same time, I would say that it was not the only cause: There are other powerful reasons. In Britain, for example, it’s not military narrative but the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon which form the template of First World War memory. Most of the Indian sepoys were illiterate and did not leave behind the abundance of diaries, letters, testimonies - so how do we recover and remember the experiences of a community for which there are no few archival traces? Moreover, the sepoys came back home to the febrile nationalist climate of 1919: Gandhi had just united Hindu and Muslim India for the Khilafat movement. In such an atmosphere, no space was created - narrative or political or socio-cultural - to commemorate the sepoys and gradually they were airbrushed out of the histories of both Europe and South Asia. WION: Can you elaborate on the role of Indian soldiers in WW1 and the socio-economic and cultural impact it had in India then? Also, the men recruited for WW1 were primarily from 'martial races' - any particular reason? Professor Das: The 'martial race' theory was a colonial construction, cobbled out of social Darwinism, political strategy and indigenous caste structures. It held that men of only particular ethnic and religious groups - Jats, Dogras, Punjabi Mussalmans, Garhwalis, Sikhs and Gurkhas - were 'naturally' martial and masculine and thereby 'fit' to fight. These men were often relatively depoliticised and loyal to the British Raj. The more politically conscious Bengalis were deemed 'effeminate' and the British Indian army obviously did not want any political dissent. In 1914, India had the largest voluntary army in the world, though a question mark hangs over the word 'voluntary'. For most, soldiering was a source of livelihood. It is not, however, possible to impose a common motive for enlistment of the 6,00,000 combatants. If the First World War soldier is usually flattened into an izzat (prestige)-driven sepoy or a hardened mercenary, we need to find a more socio-culturally and psychologically nuanced vocabulary. Economic necessity or incentive, family and community traditions, an internalised ethos of 'martial races' and the cult of heroic masculinity were all fused and confused, hinting at a complex structure of feeling that went beyond the reductive categories of organic loyalty or mercenary impulse: Instead, what we have is a complex, and at times ambivalent, emotional world where loyalty to one's regiment and comrades would co-exist with reservations against the colonial state. WION: How did the initial recruitment process start and posting? Give us an additional account on their salary structure, and credentials required during the recruitment process. How was the general sentiment of people as per your findings? Professor Das: The whole recruitment campaign can be divided into three rough phases: From 1914 to 1916, it was largely 'voluntary', even if propelled by economic incentives; in 1917, we see the beginning of the use of force; and from April to November 1918, it was largely coercion. July 1917 marked a turning point. With a fresh directive to 'double the previous flow of recruits', Punjab was called upon to provide a monthly total of 14,290 fighting men and a punitive quota system was introduced whereby the zaildars, suffered poshes and lambardars were required to raise a certain number of men, through their influence or force. In the summer of 1918, the Lieutenant-Governor Michael O'Dwyer promised to raise 200,000 men over the coming year. Andrew Thompson, the Chief Secretary to the Punjab Government admitted to a series of coercive measures, from the cutting off of irrigation water supply to levying exorbitant revenues on zails which failed meet the recruitment quota. Indeed, the Congress report on the Punjab disturbances in 1919, widely held to be written by Gandhi, is particularly illuminating. During the summer of 1918, the district officers and local zaildars and lambardars, resorted to a spree of brutal measures: Lists were compiled of families which had more than one son; recruits began to be bought and sold for large amounts of money; farmers who did not offer their sons were denied remission from income tax. The number of men charged with offences or 'challaned' went up by 300% in 1918 and charges were dropped when they enlisted; in Attock and Mianwali, men fled to the North West Frontier province to avoid being recruited; water-supply was cut off to parts of Multan. The average pay of the sepoy or infantryman was Rs 11 and he received 'batta' or special allowance for foreign or field service; a sowar or cavalryman was paid Rs 14, and an additional Rs 20 for the horse, totalling Rs 34. WION: This year, global leaders like Antonio Guterres, Angela Merkel, and Emmanuel Macron took to Twitter during the 100th Anniversary of the end of 'The Great War' warned about the dangers of the rise of nationalism without referring to Donald Trump. As a historian what are your observations on the current trend? Professor Das: Absolutely I cannot agree more. As Tagore famously wrote in Nationalism (1917) - his powerful response to the First World War - it was European belligerent nationalism and rivalry that led to the war, and we have now the frightening spectre of right-wing nationalism across the whole world - and not just in the US. Nationalism, as a political ideology, is very different from one's love for one country, and Tagore called it a demonic force, 'carnivorous', 'soul-destroying’ and 'machine-like' and its climax was the carnage and devastation of the First World War. So it's absolutely essential that we take its lessons.

Belligerent nationalism led to WW1, essential to learn from that: Professor Santanu Das to WION

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Belligerent nationalism led to WW1, essential to learn from that: Professor Santanu Das to WION