Abstract
Over 1.4 million Indian soldiers
joined the Indian Army during World War I. They were deployed at various war
fronts including France, Mesopotamia, East Africa, Egypt, Palestine, and
Gallipoli. Despite their important role, the stories of these soldiers remained
almost unstudied until the turn of the century. The fact remained that the
Indian soldiers were generally not literate enough to record their experiences.
Colonial rulers also kept them as extras on the ‘stage’ of the historical
narrative. During the centenary commemoration of the War (2014-2018), some
studies about Indian participation have been conducted leading to some good
publications. This Paper was also part of one such study. The Paper seeks to
study the voices of Indian soldiers recorded during their internment at a POW
camp in Germany during World War I. These voices were recorded between 1915 and
1918 by researchers of ‘Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission’ with an aim to
study different languages for phonetics, dialects, and linguistics purposes.
Introduction
Some voice recordings of Indian soldiers interned in Prisoner of War (PoW) camps in Germany, during World War I, are archived at Humboldt University in Berlin. These voices were recorded between 1915 and 1918 by researchers of the ‘Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission’. The objective was to study different languages for phonetics, dialects, and linguistic purposes and teach foreign languages in German universities. Strategically, the production of knowledge on colonial races and languages could help train the German officers to be posted to these colonies to set up a bigger German empire after winning the war. The voices captured in shellac discs have survived for over a century despite Germany being ruined by two world wars. Perhaps, these are the oldest voice recordings of Indian soldiers anywhere in the world.
Unfortunately, we were unaware of these
voices even after the turn of almost a century. These recordings became known
thanks to some German scholars who dug out and brought forth this rare material.1 These voices have acquired a tremendous historical
value over the period. Thomas Edison’s invention of phonograph, in 1877,
led to capturing of voices in disc which could be heard even after the life of
the person. These voice recordings are an unusual source for compilation of
history of our soldiers of the Great War. As Franziska Roy and Heike Liebau
point out that the colonial soldiers were doubly marginalised, they are
forgotten in memory and left out of history.2
The Indian soldiers, indeed, were not
literate enough to leave behind written records. Their history, therefore,
remained mostly blurred. Despite their crucial role in this war, they were kept
as extras on the ‘stage’ of historical narrative. These voices break the
historical silence and register their presence, reminding the historians about
Indian participation in the Great War. This article endeavours to revisit the
Indian soldiers of World War I by probing some of their voice recordings
archived at Germany.
Who
were these Internees?
Who
were these internees? The British Indian Army was mobilised and deployed on the
western front (France) soon after the declaration of the war in August 1914.
They landed at Marseilles, France in October 1914 and fought some fierce
battles at Ypres, Festubert, Givenchy, Loos, and Neuve Chappelle during the
next one year.3 Over 130,000 Indians were deployed on this
front of the war.4 While fighting the Germans here, about 1,000
Indians were taken prisoners and brought to Germany.5 They comprised men mainly from Punjab, United
Provinces (present day Uttar Pradesh), and Nepal.6 The Germans had hundreds of POW camps for Entente
(Britain, Russia, and France) powers and their dependencies. The South Asians
were later segregated,7 and shifted to Wunsdorf
camp, near Berlin, along with other colonial POWs for political indoctrination.8 The camp was setup in temporary hutments, surrounded
by a barbed-wire fence. Subsequently, the Indians interned here were sent to
Romania in 1917.9
The main purpose of the Halfmoon camp
was to turn its internees against their British and French colonial rulers, and
recruit them for German and Ottoman forces. Simultaneously, the camp also
became the site of extensive anthropological research, carried out upon prisoners
interned there including Sikh and Muslim soldiers from India, Gurkhas from
Nepal, and African soldiers from French colonies.
Process
of the Voice Recording
The
prison camp with men from different ethnicity were considered as colonial
laboratory on German soil.10 In 1915, some professors of Berlin University
approached the military authorities for permission to conduct research on the
prisoners to study their race, languages, dialects, etc. The initiative led to
the appointment of a body called ‘Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission’ in
October 1915 by the Prussian Government. The Commission included some thirty
academics working in the fields of linguistics, anthropology, and musicology,
among others. They selected 31 POW camps among hundreds in Germany. One camp
was Wunsdorf (also called Halfmoon camp)11, where
Indians were interned. This camp was more widely covered and visited because of
the rich socio-cultural diversity of POWs here from the Indian subcontinent.
Wilhelm Doegen, a researcher (a Philologist) in the Commission, looked after
the task of voice recordings. The recordings were done very systematically as
follows:
n Preparation of script. First the
prisoners were asked to prepare a script of the material they desired to speak
about. They could seek the help of their fellow internees in this work.
n Recording process. Then, each POW
was asked to stand in front of the phonographic funnel and read out the script.
He could also sing a song or tell a story on the funnel of the gramophone.
n Details of records. The research
team would then fill in a designed proforma detailing the name, age, caste,
language, permanent address of the internee, as also the date and type of
recording like poem, song, story, etc.
n Preparation of Phonetic notation of
recorded voice.
n Fair copy of the original script.
n German translation of the script.
German researchers were very meticulous
in documentation. The Commission recorded 2,672 audio-media (gramophone discs
and wax cylinders) of about 250 languages, dialects, and traditional music of
PoW interned in Germany. The recordings ranged between few seconds to about
four minutes. As for the Indian recordings, the collection at Lautarchiv (Sound
Archives) comprises 282 titles on 193 shellac discs. These cover more than a
dozen languages and dialects, including Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Baluchi,
Pashto, Khasi, Limbu, Magari, Gurung, Sylheti, Rai, etc.12 Mass
of the Indian POWs in this camp belonged to areas like Fatehpur, Gonda, Etawah,
Rai Bareilly in United Provinces; Amritsar, Patiala, Ferozepur in Punjab;
Gurkhas from Nepal, and Baluchis from Baloch region (of present-day Pakistan). The men from
United Province generally recorded chhand, bhajans, choupai,
etc., in Hindi with their local dialect.
The
Content of the Indian Recordings
The recordings of the Indians include
legends, fairy tales, fables, poems, religious content, biographical content of
speaker, about their home country, and their experiences of war, etc. As the
prisoners formulated their own texts, some chose to record folk stories. Sepoy
Seoraj Singh, a Thakur from Sairpaur, Rai Bareilly, of 9th Bhopal Infantry, on
03 January 1917 recorded one of the famous kissas from Akbar-Birbal
stories.13 Sib Singh, a soldier from
Amritsar revealed his ignorance about the rulers of the world. He recorded:
“The German Badshah (Emperor)
is very wise. He wages war against all Badshah. The Englishman
is Badshah in India. We did not know that there were
other Badshah also. When the war began, we came to know about
several Badshah. In India, people do not know anything on this
aspect”.14
Sib Singh here observes that contrary to
the general perceptions of ordinary Indian villagers, besides the British
Emperor, there were other emperors also and they were equally wise and
powerful. He points to the ignorance of many Indians in that regard.
The scrutiny of the voice recordings
indicate that most internees were uncomfortable narrating their stories before
the phonogram. They found singing songs and writing poems easier and,
therefore, most chose to recite. Many sang religious songs. To illustrate,
Sepoy Chhote Singh, from Fatehpur, United Provinces, recited the story of Lord
Rama from the Ramayana.15 Some group songs were also
recorded. In one recording, three Indian POWs, Mahtap Singh, Shivdular Singh,
and Baldev Singh from United Provinces, sang a group song related to different
avatars of the God Vishnu. Some recordings relate to ghost stories. On 08
December 1916, one Bhawan Singh, from Almora recorded that when a person dies,
he turns into a ghost and his soul constantly roams around in the air. He
claimed to have encountered many ghosts of his colleagues who had died in the
war.16
The study of the recordings suggests
that Indian soldiers generally chose to narrate stories or songs based on
religion, classical tales, and mythology. However, as we know, the soldiers
were young, in their late teens or twenties, and away from their families, and
we find some stories and recitations related to romance and the pain of
separation. Sepoy Kalikadin Pande, a 27 years old soldier from Sultanpur
(United Provinces) who belonged to the 9th Bhopal Infantry, described the
beauty of a damsel in his recitation.17 The
use of similes in his articulation compared the black dye of eyes with dark
cloud bhado (rainy month); shining of bindi with the sunshine of Kartik
month, and the shape of her chest with moulding of a goldsmith. Suffering from
pangs of separation, the soldier expresses his pain to his fiancé that he is in
prison in a foreign land, like a bird in a cage, adding that his flesh and
blood might be in the German camp but his heart is always with her.
While narrating his story of being made
POW, Sepoy Mal Singh of Punjab spoke about his fondness for home-made food. He
wished to eat it again when repatriated after the war. Nevertheless, he did not
mention the condition of food at the POW camp. He had been away from his home
for the last three years and was apprehensive about when the war would end. He
wished to return to his home as soon as possible.18 A
Gurkha soldier reminisces the beautiful Himalayan terrain stating that he did
not want to live in Europe anymore. He wished to reach out to his home as soon
as possible.19 Unfortunately, he died in
captivity and could never make it to his village in Nepal. His voice captured
in wax disc became last record of his existence and his last will.20 Sepoy Bela Singh, from Amritsar, recorded about his
deployment by the British on the war front. He narrated that the weapons of
Germany were superior, and he was taken prisoner. He mentions that he felt
happy when he met the German interlocutor, Mr Walter.21 In
fact, Paul Walter was a former missionary who was dispatched to the western
front to work as an interpreter and receive the Indian POWs. He later became
instrumental in transferring the Indian POWs from various POW camps to Halfmoon
camp in Wunsdorf for political reasons and worked as translator to them. Bela
Singh explains his story of being captured and taken to Germany.
Recordings
Sanitised
It
is important to note that recordings are almost silent about camp life, camp
conditions, basic amenities, etc. It suggests that the narratives were either
censored before recordings on the gramophone funnel or the POWs were instructed
in advance on dos and don’ts. POWs hardly mention their units, which every
soldier invariably speaks while introducing himself. This trend was in vogue
during the era of World War I. Fauji Akhbars of the period are full of
letters from soldiers and they cited the name of unit every time they made
correspondence. Further, hardly ever anyone spoke about mistreatment, hunger,
diseases, and deaths in the camp.22 A
Sikh soldier, Sepoy Sundar Singh, however, took the Germans to task by
recording his pain.
Expressing his happiness of being
provided with the Guru Granth Sahib, Sepoy Sundar Singh pointed out that the Rumala
Sahib cloth did not accompany Granth Sahib, and this hurt the sentiments of
Sikhs in the camp. He also revealed that the food was not adequate for the
prisoners in the camp. Sepoy Sundar Singh, perhaps, dared to record his feeling
despite the fact that he knew that the recordings ultimately would be
translated into the German language.23 About
226 Indians out of some 1,000 died in German captivity. According to a report,
mortality rate of POWs was highest amongst the South Asians.
Conclusion
One
fact common in all narratives of the Indians, is, that there should be an end
to hostilities, and they should be repatriated to their motherland. But none of
them could be sure whether they would live to witness the end of the war. They
suffered the forced labour, scarcity of food, the recurring diseases, and the
emotional torment. The possibility of imminent death always loomed on their
mind on a daily basis. Some recordings
speak of the mental state of the soldiers in the PoW camps. The voices, in all,
conclusively touch upon contemporary tastes. Interestingly, some of the
recorded bhajans and stories (kisse) are still in use,
notwithstanding the test of the time, and people take much interest in them.24 The
change and continuity in folklore and tradition, thus, can be gauged by these
voice recordings. One of the bhajans which I heard, in one recording of
1917, is sung in villages in north India even today.25 There could be some more such songs and stories.
Endnotes
1 See Franziska
Roy, Heike Liebau & Ravi Ahuja, When the War began We heard of
several Kings: South Asian Prisoners in World War I Germany, Social Science
Press, New Delhi, 2011. Also the documentary film ‘The Halfmoon Files: A
Ghost Story’ by German filmmaker Philip Scheffner. Irene Hilden has also
worked extensively on the subject in her book‘Absent Presences in the
Colonial Archive: Dealing with the Berlin Sound Archive’s Acoustic Legacies’,
published by Leuven University Press in 2022.
2 Roy, Liebau &
Ahuja, When the War began We heard of several Kings, p. 2.
3 Meerut and Lahore
divisions reached Marseilles in Oct 1914. Indians were responsible for manning
one-third of the British line in France.
4 India’s
Contribution to Great War, Government Press, Calcutta 1924, pp. 96-7.
5 Ravi Ahuja, Lost
Engagements? Traces of South Asian Soldiers in German Captivity, 1915-1918, in When
the War began We heard of several Kings, p. 20. Also see Andrew Tait Jarboe,
The Prisoner Dilemma: Britain, Germany, and the Repatriation of Indian
Prisoners of War, in Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs,
2014, 103/2, pp. 201-210.
6 Some of the units
the men belonged to include the 58th Rifles, 9th Bhopal, 1/3 Gorkha Rifles,
127th Baluchis, and 129th Baluchis. See A Voice recording, a portrait photo,
and three drawings: Tracing the life of a colonial soldier, by Heike Liebau,
Working Paper, No. 20, 2018, p. 4. According to a report in The Tribune, some
of the men were from the 15th Ludhiana Sikhs, 47th Sikhs, and 4th Gurkha
Rifles. See Sarika Sharma, 100 Years Later, Voices from World War I, in The
Tribune, dated 20 May 2018.
7 In April 1915,
some 400 Indian POWs (95 Muslim, 160 Gurkhas, 65 Sikhs, and 71 Thakurs in April
1915) were interned in Halfmoon Camp. In June 1917, when a large group of South
Asians had been transferred to Romania, another 631 Indians (most were
lascars/seamen) were registered in Halfmoon camp. Wundorf had some 10,000
prisoners in total.
8 Most of the Asian
and African colonial soldiers in German captivity were transferred for
political reasons to special camps in the neighbouring towns of Zossen and
Wunsdorf south of Berlin. In the Halfmoon Camp, they were to undergo political
and nationalistic indoctrination and be persuaded to rebel against their
colonial rulers. The propaganda was nationalistic and pan-Islamic. See Britta
Lange, ‘South Asian Soldiers and German Academics: Anthropological, Linguistic
and Musicological Field studies in Prison Camps,’ in When the war began we
heard of several kings, p. 150.
9 Prisoners of War
(India), by Heike Liebau, see
https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/prisoners_of_war_india
10 Roy, Liebau &
Ahuja, When the War began We heard of several Kings, p. 12.
11 Halfmoon Camp at
Wunsdorf was named after crescent of the mosque erected for POWs.
12 See Website of
Lautarchiv http://www.sammlungen.hu-berlin.de/schlagworte/3687/dokumente/?p=0.
Accessed on 5 April 2017.
13 PK 653, dated
3.1.1917, Lautarchiv, Humboldt, Germany.
14 PK 610, dated
9.12.1916, Lautarchiv, Humboldt, Germany.
15 PK 648, dated
3.1.1917, Lautarchiv, Humboldt, Germany.
16 PK 591, dated
8.12.1916, Lautarchiv, Humboldt, Germany.
17 PK 655, dated
3.1.1917, Lautarchiv, Humboldt, Germany.
18 PK 691, dated
11.12.1916, Lautarchiv, Humboldt, Germany.
19 PK 307, dated
6.9.1916, Lautarchiv, Humboldt, Germany.
20 Britta Lange, Post restante, and messages in
bottles: Sound recordings of Indian prisoners in the First World War, in Social
Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, vol 41 No. 1 (2015), pp. 84-100.
21 PK 589, dated
8.12.1916, Lautarchiv, Humboldt, Germany.
22 Britta Lange,
Archival Silence as Historical Sources, in Sound Effects, vol. 7, no. 3,
2017, pp. 47-60.
23 PK 676 dated 5
Jan 1917, Lautarchiv, Humboldt, Germany.
24 PK 648, dated
3.1.1917, Lautarchiv, Humboldt, Germany.
25 Raghuvar
Koshalya ke lal, tumhi ho jag rachane vaale …
@Dr Narender Yadav works as Deputy Directory in the History Division, Ministry of Defence. The views expressed here are his own. Journal of the United Service Institution of India, Vol. CLIII, No. 632, April-June 2023. |