Of Home And The World In Times of War
Amitabha Bhattacharya
INDIA, EMPIRE, AND FIRST WORLD WAR CULTURE: WRITINGS, IMAGES, AND SONGS by Santanu Das Cambridge University Press, 2018, 466 pp., $27.99
August 2019, volume 43, No 8

So much has already been written on the history of the First World War—its cause, spread and consequences—that an addition to the corpus of existing literature, expanded substantially in the last few years on the occasion of the war’s centenary, is unlikely to cause much of a stir. Yet the book by Santanu Das that seeks to be ‘the first cultural and literary history of India and the First World War, though it necessarily engages with the social and the political’ has turned out to be a definitive exercise that enriches our understanding like few others before.

Santanu Das, educated in Kolkata and Cambridge, is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture, University of Oxford, and currently a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College there. As an established authority in this field, he has woven a text in which original research and survey of relevant literature have been infused with much insight and empathy.

How much, in concrete terms, has been India’s contribution to Britain’s war effort? What were the motivations for our colonized country to give its best? While India was dragged into the war without any discussion with its leaders, how is it that leaders like Tilak and Gandhi involved themselves in the process of recruitment of sepoys and others? Most importantly, what indelible impact has our engagement with the war made on the literature, painting, photography and other art-forms both in India and Europe? These are some of the issues addressed in this book. Now that a century has elapsed, it has been possible for scholars like Das to make nuanced analyses of such issues.

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