Material culture in the Indian Army during the First World War

India contributed the most men of any country to the First World War; over 1,400,000 men were recruited, and between 60,000-70,000 of these men were killed in action. Despite this, the role of Indian Army soldiers - and of other colonial armies - is vastly underrepresented in literature on the War, which has historically prioritised written and verbal evidence over the new perspectives about lived practices that can be gleaned through the study of material culture. This is particularly important given the high rates of illiteracy amongst Indian Army soldiers, many of whom came from illiterate north Indian communities deliberately targeted by recruiting policies rooted in the theory of martial races. As a result, very few Indian soldiers wrote letters home, and those that did typically used a bilingual British officer to transcribe the words that were then passed through a Censor for Indian Mail. Historians have therefore pieced together the Indian Army experience from incomplete, highly curated accounts. Together with photographs taken by European war photographers, and 'India Office' records held at the British Library, these have been the key resources for any record of the Indian contribution to the War. As the recent AHRC-funded project Whose Remembrance? at the Imperial War Museum highlighted, colonial contributions to the War have received poor coverage and the 'rich territory' of untapped histories this topic offers to historians 'deserves to be more intensively pursued and permanently included in mainstream narratives.'

By incorporating non-verbal artefacts, this project supplements the traditional archive with an extensive range of primary sources that speak to the Indian Army experience of the First World War. The dressed body is a powerful subject of investigation where verbal accounts are missing; it is a manifestation of intention and a site for practices of dress and body maintenance that may conform to or resist multiple belief and value systems that prescribe the ideal dressed body, which has gone unexplored in the existing scholarship on colonial military forces during the War. By reintroducing the dressed body, this project orientates its account of the War with the Indian Army soldier at the centre.