India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs

Based on ten years of research, Santanu Das' book recovers 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.

More than 1.5 million Indians were recruited. Das draws on a variety of fresh, unusual sources - objects, images, rumours, street-pamphlets, sound recordings, folksongs, testimonies, poetry, essays, and fiction - to produce a major 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 the empire.