Indian Labour and the Geographies of the Great War

This chapter assesses the key role of the non-combatant or follower ranks in the history of sub-imperial drives exerted across the land and sea frontiers of India. The reliance of the War Office upon combatant and non-combatant detachments from the Indian Army, used in combination with units of the British Army, left an imprint upon the first consolidated Indian Army Act of 1911. From 1914 the inter-regional contests of the Government of India for territory and influence, such as those running along the Arabian frontiers of the Ottoman empire, folded into global war. Nevertheless the despatch of an Indian Expeditionary Force to Europe in August 1914 disrupted raced imaginaries of the world order. The second less publicized exercise was the sending of Indian Labor Corps and of humble horse and mule drivers to France in 1917-18. The colour bar imposed by the Dominions on Indian settlers had begun to complicate the utilisation of Indian labor and Indian troops on behalf of empire. Over 1919-21, as global conflict segued back into imperial militarism, a strong critique emerged in India against the unilateral deployment of Indian troops and military labor, on fiscal grounds, in protest against their use to suppress political life in India and to condemn the international order which their use sustained.

Introduction

(246)The introduction outlines the quest to shed some light on the follower or non-combatant ranks of the Indian Army and to draw upon the approaches of trans-national and connected history to locate India more integrally in the landscapes of World War one. For different reasons, both the colonial regime and the Indian intelligentsia let the figure of ‘the coolie’ and the ‘menial’ follower dissolve into the hyper-masculine figure of the Indian sepoy. Combatant and non-combatant recruitment overlapped. Nevertheless a focus on the follower ranks brings new actors such as convicts , ‘primitives’, and ‘untouchables’ into the story and alerts us to the presence of missionaries and educated Indians in the command structure of the Labor Corps. The long term importance of India’s demographic resources to empire explains why the sending of non-combatants for military use had to be constantly weighed against other objectives equally important to the prosecution of the war: the supply of material resources, the generation of export surpluses and the maintenance of transport infrastructures. Political issues, such as the campaign to abolish indentured migration from India, and the colour-bar in empire, also complicated the supply of non-combatants. The manpower hunger of the war overthrew the boundaries between one form of positioning labor at a work-site and another. Nevertheless some account had to be taken of existing patterns of off-farm work. The need to rationalise manpower- use and to improve the efficiency of the auxiliary services introduced a discourse of modernity to the discussion about post-war military reconstruction.

The Recruiter’s Eye on the ‘Primitive’

(237words) This chapter explores the deepening during World War one of colonial interest in the military, labor and political potential of those it categorized as ‘primitive’ populations. Among these were the ‘hill-men’ of India’s North-East Frontier deployed for militarist border-making both as porters and as informal auxiliaries. But work gangs for road building and expeditionary columns were also drawn from so- called ‘Santhalis’ or ‘aboriginals’, strung along the path of migration eastwards from Bihar and Orissa. Keen to highlight the importance to empire of the North-East Frontier, considered less significant than the North-West Frontier, the Assam government offered to raise ‘primitive hill-men’ labor companies for France. Some ‘hill-men’ chiefs feared the depletion of their retinues, others saw new opportunities unfold. Recruitment set up circuits between local conflicts and new theatres of war, resulting in the prolonged Kuki-Chin uprising of 1917-1919 along the Assam –Burma border. War also intensified the extractive drives of state and capital over forest and mineral resources, as illustrated in a small uprising in Mayurbhanj in Bihar and Orissa in which ‘Santhalis’ were held to be very prominent.. At both sites officials concluded that the resistance of ‘primitive’ populations to war- drives which subjected their persons and re-shaped their environments arose from ‘millenarian’ dreams of autonomy. However ‘primitivity’ also offered rich possibilities for the post-war reconstruction of imperial legitimacy. It was the ground on which certain tracts inhabited by ‘backward populations’ were excluded from the scheme of responsible government introduced in 1919.

The Short Career of the Indian Labour Corps in France

This chapter adds the story of the Indian Labor Corps to the narratives of the various ‘colored’ units brought to France to deal with the manpower crisis which erupted in 1916.The label ‘colored’ or ‘native labor’ justified inferior care and a harsher work and disciplinary regime than that experienced by white labor. The notion was that to ‘work’ natives properly, the managerial regimes peculiar to them also had to be imported into the metropolis. However distinct social and political agendas gave some units or companies more room than others to get acknowledgement for their services. The chapter explores the war experience of the men in the Indian Labor Corps, beginning with their transformation into military property, and the stretched out journey which took them to France and brought them back. Experience also took shape from their engagement with the environments, object -worlds, and orders of time within which they were positioned. By creating suggestive equivalences between themselves and other military personnel, they sought to lift themselves from the status of coolies to that of participants in a common project of war service. At the same time, they indicated that they had not put their persons at the disposal of the state in exactly the same way as the combatant.

Front Lines and Status Lines

.Over 1897-1902, the Tirah campaign, the South African war and the China expedition made it necessary to re-organise the standing non-combatant units of the Indian Army. The contention was that the combatant and the follower ranks of the Indian Army were recruited from entirely different rural strata. In fact there was a considerable overlap in recruiting pools. This overlap increased in World War one due to the growing importance of the auxiliary services and the need to conserve all labor and use it more ‘efficiently’. The ‘higher’ followers, those organised in distinct departments, such as mule-driver and stretcher-bearer units, benefitted from the unsettling of status hierarchies and wage differences; less so the attached or ‘menial’ followers who provided ‘domestic’ services and included ‘untouchable’ service-providers in their ranks. The chapter engages with the global history of domestic work to examine the production of ‘menial’ status in the institutional context of the Indian Army., The care-giving services of the ‘menial’ follower reproduced both the ‘martial caste’ standing of the Indian soldier and the race standing of the British soldier. The ‘menial follower’ tried to stabilise his situation of institutional precarity but remained vulnerable to a regime of personal and discretionary discipline.

The Ends of War

This chapter explores the termination of the Great War as a prolonged event, marked by de-mobilisation and re-mobilisation, and shaped by a variety of political interventions. The return home, in the various forms that it took, was an exercise government had to manage throughout the war. It was a crucial part of the war experience for military personnel and one they sought to shape. The chapter examines the ‘returnee’ in his various avatars – as deserter, disabled service-man, and prisoner- of- war, and discharged veteran. It suggests that returning personnel explored a wider range of political options than allowed for in existing literature, where the key question is whether de-mobilised personnel returned with anti-imperialist views and participated in the seething mass movements of 1919-21. The widening arc of military recruitment in 1917-1919 had synergized with the hectic forging of new political constituencies to intensify expectations and anxieties among military personnel. Their prolonged post-Armistice deployment, even as British and Dominion troops were being de-mobilised, gave them the confidence to question race and institutional hierarchies in the army and this was not an apolitical response. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the politics of commemoration and the invocation of an ‘Asia’ stretching from West and Central Asia into India, united by an imagination of self-government.

Afterword

The book concludes with a tentative exploration of the way in which the labor demand created by the war, both in industry and in the military complex, encouraged discussions about labor efficiency, labor rationalization and labor welfare. In war propaganda the ruling race contended with deficiencies of body and intellect and social outlook in ‘coloured labor’, but succeeded in making it serviceable for empire. By the power of military routine and by the application of science and technology, raw followers were being turned into trained servants, skilled railway labor or motor mechanics, customary skills were being refined, and trade-training programmes for disabled military personnel had not only saved them from beggary, but positioned them in modern sectors of the Indian economy. What was at play was both a racialized discourse of labor efficiency and a conviction that recalibrations were possible. Success in this sphere was also expected to boost the utilization of India’s human and natural resources for the post-war reconstruction of Britain’s commercial standing. The war years therefore shaped the unfolding of a new political agenda, that by which ’ unskilled, shiftless coolies’ were to be transformed into a modern labor force by time -discipline, skilling, public health and sanitation and efforts at cultural ‘uplift’.

Making the Desert Bloom?

World War one witnessed the first dense flow of Indian labor into the Persian Gulf. To reconstruct the campaign in Mesopotamia/Iraq after the reverses of 1915-16, the Indian Army demanded non-combatants for dock-work, construction labor and medical and transport services. This chapter explores the Government of India’s anxious deliberations about the choice of legal form in which to meet this demand. The sending of labor for military work overseas had to be distanced conceptually from the stigmatized system of indentured labor migration. There was a danger of disrupting those labor networks across India and around the Bay of Bengal which maintained the supply of material goods for the war. Non-combatant recruitment took the war into new sites and spaces. Regimes of labor servitude were tapped but some form of emancipation had to be promised. The chapter focusses on seven jail- recruited Indian Labor and Porter Corps to explore the work regime in Mesopotamia. Labor units often insisted on fixed engagements rather than ‘duration of war’ agreements, but had to struggle for exit at the conclusion of their contract. After the Armistice, Britain still needed Indian labor and troops in Mesopotamia but sought to prevent the emergence of a settler population.