India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs by Santanu Das (review)

The longstanding call for a more inclusive approach to First World War literature, art, and culture, one that encompasses the experiences of the non-European, the female, and the noncombatant, has resounded for quite some time—perhaps even from the day in 1975 when Paul Fussell published his seminal...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Modern Fiction Studies 2019-12, Vol.65 (4), p.728-731
Main Author: Higbee, Douglas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Allusion
Archives & records
Armed forces
Culture
Diaries
Literary influences
Literature
Narratives
Owen, Wilfred (1893-1918)
Palimpsests
Singh, Gurmeet Ram Rahim
Tagore, Rabindranath (1861-1941)
War
World War I
Writers
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Summary:The longstanding call for a more inclusive approach to First World War literature, art, and culture, one that encompasses the experiences of the non-European, the female, and the noncombatant, has resounded for quite some time—perhaps even from the day in 1975 when Paul Fussell published his seminal (but rather narrowly conceived) exploration of First World War literary culture, The Great War and Modern Memory. [...]Das links the sepoy experience to pre-independence nationalism; in one of the more enlightening claims of his book, Das writes that for most Indians in the war years “nation and empire had not yet defined themselves as antithetical terms” (51). [...]the poignant but enigmatic photo on the book’s cover of a sepoy in Mesopotamia touching a propeller from the plane of two downed British airmen, erected as a memorial by the Turks, typifies Das’s emphasis on touch and emotional intimacy—the complex “structure of feeling” (23) of a colonized Indian man serving the British imperial military thousands of miles from home, reaching out to handle a memorial relic created for two dead Britons by another colonized soldier-subject in a photograph taken by a European.
ISSN:0026-7724
1080-658X
1080-658X
DOI:10.1353/mfs.2019.0053