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The Coolie's Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-1921
Though largely invisible in histories of the First World War, over??550,000 men in the ranks of the Indian army were non-combatants. From the porters, stevedores and construction workers in the Coolie Corps to those who maintained supply lines and removed the wounded from the battlefield, Radhika Singha recovers the story of this unacknowledged service.
The labor regimes built on the backs of these 'coolies' sustained the military infrastructure of empire; their deployment in interregional arenas bent to the demands of global war. Viewed as racially subordinate and subject to 'non-martial' caste designations, they fought back against their status, using the warring powers' need for manpower as leverage to challenge traditional service hierarchies and wage differentials.
The Coolie's Great War views that global conflict through the lens of Indian labor, constructing a distinct geography of the war--from tribal settlements and colonial jails, beyond India's frontiers, to the battlefronts of France and Mesopotamia.
The labor regimes built on the backs of these 'coolies' sustained the military infrastructure of empire; their deployment in interregional arenas bent to the demands of global war. Viewed as racially subordinate and subject to 'non-martial' caste designations, they fought back against their status, using the warring powers' need for manpower as leverage to challenge traditional service hierarchies and wage differentials.
The Coolie's Great War views that global conflict through the lens of Indian labor, constructing a distinct geography of the war--from tribal settlements and colonial jails, beyond India's frontiers, to the battlefronts of France and Mesopotamia.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published October 15, 2020
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About the author
Radhika Singha
2 books7 followersRadhika Singha is Professor of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Her research interests focus on colonial crime and criminal law, identification practices, colonial governmentality, and the history of borders and border–crossing in South Asia. The mobilization of human, fiscal and material resources from South Asia for World War one has become an intersecting research track.
Her research interests focus on colonial crime and criminal law, identification practices, colonial governmentality, and the history of borders and border–crossing in South Asia. The mobilization of human, fiscal and material resources from South Asia for World War one has become an intersecting research track.
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May 1, 2021
‘This important work illuminates a little-known and fascinating aspect of the Indian experience of the First World War. It reveals insights not only into British imperial policy and the British Indian military, but also into Indian society and its development in the first part of the twentieth century.’ – Anatol Lieven, Professor, Georgetown University Qatar
The word ‘coolie’ in the title of the book has been to designate a class of labour consigned to the lowest rung of the global market in the 19th century, one presumed to be unskilled and infinitely replaceable.
The aim of this book has been to instigate a dialogue between military history and labour history, and to shed light on the actors consigned to the sidelines of the story of India in World War One.
Of the 1.4 million Indians enlisted to the war up to 31 December 1919, some 563,369 were followers or non-combatants. For diverse motives, both the colonial regime and the Indian intelligentsia preferred to foreground the ‘martial classes’, and to let ‘coolies’ and ‘menial followers’ minimally bloat the sum of India’s manpower contribution.
The Government of India wanted to fling a military shroud over the ‘coolie’, to evade controversies around indentured migration on top of the formalities of the Indian Emigration Act. Educated Indians preferred to reside on the figure of the valiant sepoy to advance their political claims, rather than on the subdued figure of the coolie or the regimental ‘menial’.
However, the aim of this book is not only to liberate the coolie and ‘the menial’ in military employment from their state of historical anonymity. It is also to find eyeholes for developing a less Eurocentric, more transnational description of World War One.
How can we position India ‘in’ the Great War instead of viewing the latter only as an external conflict to which the nation ‘contributed’?
How can we do so while all the same retaining a logic of the ‘lumpiness’ of this global divergence, the differences in timeline, form, scale and intensity through which its brunt was felt?
As the opening chapter shows, one of the ‘sub-imperial’ drives emanating from India was a rivalry for authority along the Arabian frontiers of the Ottoman Empire. The Government of India consequently had to stay ever considerate to diverse Muslim publics within India and across her borders.
This imperative had to be worked out even more ornately in World War One, given that the Ottoman Sultan was allied with Germany, and one-third of the Indian Army was made up of Muslims.
The Russian Revolution of November 1917 and the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, similarly prompted engagement with transnational Muslim publics. ‘German-Turco-Bolshevik intrigue’ in Central Asia, Persia and Afghanistan seemed to bring war closer to the borders of India, and covert and overt operations by the Indian Army were deployed to throw up a barrier.
The author has divided the book into the six following chapters:
1. Indian Labour and the Geographies of the Great War
2. Front Lines and Status Lines: The Follower Ranks of the Indian Army
3. Making the Desert Bloom? The Indian Labour and Porter Corps in Iraq, 1916–21
4. The Recruiter’s Eye on the ‘Primitive’: Those Who Went to the Great War and Those Who Wouldn’t
5. The Short Career of the Indian Labour Corps in France: Experiences and Representations
6. The Ends of War: Homecoming for the Indian Soldier and Follower, 1914–21
Chapters One and Four engage with one of the basic premises of this book: 1) the labour regimes and 2) ecologies of work which sustained the colonial military infrastructure in India.
India’s function as an imperial garrison east of the Suez meant that a third of the colony’s pre-World War One annual budget was spent on the army. This does not take account of roads and railways built for strategic, rather than commercial, imperatives.
Chapters Four and Six contend that the supposed ‘minor frontier operations’ of 1917–20 were not disconnected from the battles of worldwide implication taking place elsewhere.
A long-standing and international standpoint gives the reader a complete sense of the factors which obscured the employment of Indian manpower to theatres of war. The army’s manpower needs had to be regularly weighed against other essentials, similarly fundamental to an empire at war, such as a) the generation of material resources, b) the creation of export surpluses, and c) the maintenance of transport infrastructures.
Chapter Two silhouettes the protagonists of this book: the follower ranks of the Indian Army, both stable and transitory. It assesses the service distinctions between combatants and followers, arguing that the follower’s work of ‘care’ bolstered both the race standing of the British soldier and the status superiority of the ‘martial castes’. It analyses the condition of ‘menial’ standing which structured the service milieu for attached followers—those such as the cook, sweeper, horse-groom, water-carrier, and cobbler.
It was an institutional arrangement shaped by the equation made between their work and that of domestic servants. This naturalised the supposition that they should be enduringly ‘on call’, and subject to an administration of extremely discretionary discipline. The presence among the attached followers of so-called ‘untouchable’ castes who were assigned to stigmatising work also kept them at the bottom of the status scale.
This chapter goes into the specifics of contracts, wages, kit and allowances, and how these distinguished soldiers from followers, and different followers from one another. Chapter Two points further out that from the turn of the century, military officers who pressed for improved wages and service conditions for the follower ranks argued that if ‘raw coolies’ were to be turned into cooks and sweepers who understood the kernels of sanitation, drilled stretcher-bearers, and mule-drivers who would not bolt under fire, then training needed to strengthen. This had to be backed up by elevated incomes, food, kit and medical care to rouse recruiting, decrease desertion and create greater competence.
Chapter Three centers on the Mesopotamian campaign, beginning with the point at which there was a predicament in the supply of every sort of follower category. This problem emerged at a time when there was a full-blown movement in progress to bring an end to the system of indentured contract by which Indian labour was sent overseas to sustain imperial sugar plantations.
There followed intense debates as to the legal form through which Indian labour might be sent for ‘military work overseas’ without recourse to the pilloried system of indentured migration.
The fourth chapter emphasizes India’s extended history of drawing upon ‘tribal populations’ from Bihar, Orissa and the Assam-Burma hill districts for border-making along the North-East Frontier. In 1917, these labour regimes were intensified to raise Labour and Porter Corps for France. The use of ‘primitive’ subjects in the most industrialised theatre of the war was an exercise which spoke to an assortment of different agendas—those of local chiefs, missionaries, paternalist administrator-ethnographers and first generation ‘tribal’ literati. The chapter discusses the grounds recruitment evoked more confrontation in some instances than in others, highlighting the across-the-board impact of the war on seemingly remote areas such as the Assam-Burma border.
Chapter Five adds the story of the Indian Labour Corps (ILC) to the now multiplying accounts of the various ‘coloured’ units brought into France to deal with the manpower crisis which overtook the western theatre of war by 1916. The labels of ‘coloured’ and ‘native’ labour justified substandard care and a harsher work and corrective regime than that which white labourers experienced. This chapter also surveys the war experience of Indian labourers in France. What was their understanding of the journey to this front, and of the social, institutional and material landscapes through which they moved? At one level they were being made over into military property, but at another there are hints of their own attempts to reconstruct the environments, object worlds, and orders of time within which they were positioned.
The concluding chapter draws upon approaches to demobilisation which assess it as a backward and forward process, one whose morphology was defined by many interventions. As underlined earlier, different terms of engagement for different categories of follower meant that a very variegated timeline marked the termination of military service. There was a flow of men back to India all through the war, made up of non-combatants who had completed their engagement, those granted furlough, invalided or discharged, and those who deserted. Using multiple timelines, Chapter Six surveys the return from military service as a major part of the war experience of Indian combatants and non-combatants, one which they tried to shape. Institutional hierarchies determined the sharing of war rewards, but due to a scarcity of sources, soldiers and non-combatants are often dealt with together in this chapter.
To conclude, in the words of the author: ‘This book has explored the exercises of power and the representations of the natural and social world through which bodies materialised as white and coloured soldiers, white and coloured labourers, martial races and menial followers. The exigencies of the war destabilised these representations—so, too, did the lived experience of those who engaged in ‘war work’, thereby bringing other identities and expectations into play. The mental and physical capacities of these different bodies were measured against each other, and in the process new imaginaries of ‘military efficiency’ and ‘labour efficiency’ emerged. I am not suggesting that clear parallels were being drawn between the domains of military work and industrial work, only that there was an ongoing discussion in both spheres about the need to conserve labour and improve its efficiency, along with a growing confidence that advances in scientific knowledge about physiology, nutrition, sanitation, and fatigue would allow deficiencies of race and climate in ‘coloured’ manpower to be reduced, if never quite overcome.’
Even though doctrinaire and grossly academic, the beautiful prose-style of the author merits all the praise.
Grab a copy if you choose.
The word ‘coolie’ in the title of the book has been to designate a class of labour consigned to the lowest rung of the global market in the 19th century, one presumed to be unskilled and infinitely replaceable.
The aim of this book has been to instigate a dialogue between military history and labour history, and to shed light on the actors consigned to the sidelines of the story of India in World War One.
Of the 1.4 million Indians enlisted to the war up to 31 December 1919, some 563,369 were followers or non-combatants. For diverse motives, both the colonial regime and the Indian intelligentsia preferred to foreground the ‘martial classes’, and to let ‘coolies’ and ‘menial followers’ minimally bloat the sum of India’s manpower contribution.
The Government of India wanted to fling a military shroud over the ‘coolie’, to evade controversies around indentured migration on top of the formalities of the Indian Emigration Act. Educated Indians preferred to reside on the figure of the valiant sepoy to advance their political claims, rather than on the subdued figure of the coolie or the regimental ‘menial’.
However, the aim of this book is not only to liberate the coolie and ‘the menial’ in military employment from their state of historical anonymity. It is also to find eyeholes for developing a less Eurocentric, more transnational description of World War One.
How can we position India ‘in’ the Great War instead of viewing the latter only as an external conflict to which the nation ‘contributed’?
How can we do so while all the same retaining a logic of the ‘lumpiness’ of this global divergence, the differences in timeline, form, scale and intensity through which its brunt was felt?
As the opening chapter shows, one of the ‘sub-imperial’ drives emanating from India was a rivalry for authority along the Arabian frontiers of the Ottoman Empire. The Government of India consequently had to stay ever considerate to diverse Muslim publics within India and across her borders.
This imperative had to be worked out even more ornately in World War One, given that the Ottoman Sultan was allied with Germany, and one-third of the Indian Army was made up of Muslims.
The Russian Revolution of November 1917 and the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, similarly prompted engagement with transnational Muslim publics. ‘German-Turco-Bolshevik intrigue’ in Central Asia, Persia and Afghanistan seemed to bring war closer to the borders of India, and covert and overt operations by the Indian Army were deployed to throw up a barrier.
The author has divided the book into the six following chapters:
1. Indian Labour and the Geographies of the Great War
2. Front Lines and Status Lines: The Follower Ranks of the Indian Army
3. Making the Desert Bloom? The Indian Labour and Porter Corps in Iraq, 1916–21
4. The Recruiter’s Eye on the ‘Primitive’: Those Who Went to the Great War and Those Who Wouldn’t
5. The Short Career of the Indian Labour Corps in France: Experiences and Representations
6. The Ends of War: Homecoming for the Indian Soldier and Follower, 1914–21
Chapters One and Four engage with one of the basic premises of this book: 1) the labour regimes and 2) ecologies of work which sustained the colonial military infrastructure in India.
India’s function as an imperial garrison east of the Suez meant that a third of the colony’s pre-World War One annual budget was spent on the army. This does not take account of roads and railways built for strategic, rather than commercial, imperatives.
Chapters Four and Six contend that the supposed ‘minor frontier operations’ of 1917–20 were not disconnected from the battles of worldwide implication taking place elsewhere.
A long-standing and international standpoint gives the reader a complete sense of the factors which obscured the employment of Indian manpower to theatres of war. The army’s manpower needs had to be regularly weighed against other essentials, similarly fundamental to an empire at war, such as a) the generation of material resources, b) the creation of export surpluses, and c) the maintenance of transport infrastructures.
Chapter Two silhouettes the protagonists of this book: the follower ranks of the Indian Army, both stable and transitory. It assesses the service distinctions between combatants and followers, arguing that the follower’s work of ‘care’ bolstered both the race standing of the British soldier and the status superiority of the ‘martial castes’. It analyses the condition of ‘menial’ standing which structured the service milieu for attached followers—those such as the cook, sweeper, horse-groom, water-carrier, and cobbler.
It was an institutional arrangement shaped by the equation made between their work and that of domestic servants. This naturalised the supposition that they should be enduringly ‘on call’, and subject to an administration of extremely discretionary discipline. The presence among the attached followers of so-called ‘untouchable’ castes who were assigned to stigmatising work also kept them at the bottom of the status scale.
This chapter goes into the specifics of contracts, wages, kit and allowances, and how these distinguished soldiers from followers, and different followers from one another. Chapter Two points further out that from the turn of the century, military officers who pressed for improved wages and service conditions for the follower ranks argued that if ‘raw coolies’ were to be turned into cooks and sweepers who understood the kernels of sanitation, drilled stretcher-bearers, and mule-drivers who would not bolt under fire, then training needed to strengthen. This had to be backed up by elevated incomes, food, kit and medical care to rouse recruiting, decrease desertion and create greater competence.
Chapter Three centers on the Mesopotamian campaign, beginning with the point at which there was a predicament in the supply of every sort of follower category. This problem emerged at a time when there was a full-blown movement in progress to bring an end to the system of indentured contract by which Indian labour was sent overseas to sustain imperial sugar plantations.
There followed intense debates as to the legal form through which Indian labour might be sent for ‘military work overseas’ without recourse to the pilloried system of indentured migration.
The fourth chapter emphasizes India’s extended history of drawing upon ‘tribal populations’ from Bihar, Orissa and the Assam-Burma hill districts for border-making along the North-East Frontier. In 1917, these labour regimes were intensified to raise Labour and Porter Corps for France. The use of ‘primitive’ subjects in the most industrialised theatre of the war was an exercise which spoke to an assortment of different agendas—those of local chiefs, missionaries, paternalist administrator-ethnographers and first generation ‘tribal’ literati. The chapter discusses the grounds recruitment evoked more confrontation in some instances than in others, highlighting the across-the-board impact of the war on seemingly remote areas such as the Assam-Burma border.
Chapter Five adds the story of the Indian Labour Corps (ILC) to the now multiplying accounts of the various ‘coloured’ units brought into France to deal with the manpower crisis which overtook the western theatre of war by 1916. The labels of ‘coloured’ and ‘native’ labour justified substandard care and a harsher work and corrective regime than that which white labourers experienced. This chapter also surveys the war experience of Indian labourers in France. What was their understanding of the journey to this front, and of the social, institutional and material landscapes through which they moved? At one level they were being made over into military property, but at another there are hints of their own attempts to reconstruct the environments, object worlds, and orders of time within which they were positioned.
The concluding chapter draws upon approaches to demobilisation which assess it as a backward and forward process, one whose morphology was defined by many interventions. As underlined earlier, different terms of engagement for different categories of follower meant that a very variegated timeline marked the termination of military service. There was a flow of men back to India all through the war, made up of non-combatants who had completed their engagement, those granted furlough, invalided or discharged, and those who deserted. Using multiple timelines, Chapter Six surveys the return from military service as a major part of the war experience of Indian combatants and non-combatants, one which they tried to shape. Institutional hierarchies determined the sharing of war rewards, but due to a scarcity of sources, soldiers and non-combatants are often dealt with together in this chapter.
To conclude, in the words of the author: ‘This book has explored the exercises of power and the representations of the natural and social world through which bodies materialised as white and coloured soldiers, white and coloured labourers, martial races and menial followers. The exigencies of the war destabilised these representations—so, too, did the lived experience of those who engaged in ‘war work’, thereby bringing other identities and expectations into play. The mental and physical capacities of these different bodies were measured against each other, and in the process new imaginaries of ‘military efficiency’ and ‘labour efficiency’ emerged. I am not suggesting that clear parallels were being drawn between the domains of military work and industrial work, only that there was an ongoing discussion in both spheres about the need to conserve labour and improve its efficiency, along with a growing confidence that advances in scientific knowledge about physiology, nutrition, sanitation, and fatigue would allow deficiencies of race and climate in ‘coloured’ manpower to be reduced, if never quite overcome.’
Even though doctrinaire and grossly academic, the beautiful prose-style of the author merits all the praise.
Grab a copy if you choose.
February 26, 2023
Very well researched and interesting to read about a certain part of Colonial Indian History that's not really documented by the mainstream media.
But very dry as well.
But very dry as well.
April 6, 2021
Eye-popping history of Indian labour in world war one. Extremely academic but the research that has gone into writing this book is so stunning. Meticulous references that one cannot avoid but read along with the content.
January 7, 2022
This books narrates the uncharted story of Indian labour (aka Coolie) in world war one. I am sure this book is a result of a lot of hard work and research (hats off to the writer fo pulling up that)
Although for a non-history background writer, this book could have been written a way to make it a easy read (like Guns, germs and steel).
Although for a non-history background writer, this book could have been written a way to make it a easy read (like Guns, germs and steel).
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews