1India is a nation in which paradoxically, the past is omnipresent but the age of any given structure can be annoyingly indeterminate. It is a place where the past can be both absolutely present and frustratingly remote; in which versions of the past co-exist; in which they can contend without necessary contradiction, though sometimes bringing risk of denunciation, controversy and even death. It is a culture in which layers of meaning and significance accrete around historical events – even historical events recorded in the daily newspaper. India takes its many pasts seriously – but can ignore aspects of its history in ways unthinkable in other societies. The Great War of 1914-1918 is an inescapable part of the history of Australia or New Zealand, and even in Britain remains a part of the currency of everyday speech and popular culture. In the nations of South Asia, by contrast, the Great War remains obscure and unimportant.

2Given the scale of undivided India’s involvement in the Great War this neglect offers a further paradox. In the course of the First World War (and several associated minor conflicts, such as ‘frontier’ expeditions and the third Anglo-Afghan war of 1919) about a million men from British India and its ‘princely states’ served and some 74,000 died, about 62,000 in operations overseas. India played an important part in the British empire’s war effort, not least as a reservoir of trained manpower, becoming the mainstay of campaigns in the Middle East. That endeavour was commemorated in the war’s aftermath, and British India commemorated its war dead much like other parts of the empire, as it did during a Second World War. In 1947, however, British India became the independent nations of India and Pakistan (which in turn spawned Bangla Desh in 1971), while Burma became independent in 1948. Sri Lanka’s memory of the Great War was almost entirely ‘white’, through the service of the Ceylon Planters Rifles and European volunteers. They were commemorated by memorials, some of which were appropriated by a nation traumatised by a more recent civil conflict. From independence commemoration of the First World War turned to apathy: these conflicts were seen as not being India’s wars; those who died had served the British Raj. Writing from a point almost exactly mid-way in the centenary of the Great War a survey of ‘India’s’ attitudes to war commemoration – astonishingly, arguably the first – is merited.

‘Foreign Cemetery’: war commemoration in South Asia

3The independent nations of the Indian sub-continent maintain a problematic relationship with the memory of war under the British Raj. For India and Pakistan, the dominant narrative of recent history has been the long struggle for political freedom: the experiences and the losses of those who served the armies of the Raj seemed irrelevant to that epic of political and sometimes armed struggle for independence, and largely remain so. Though the Indian National Congress early in the war had hoped that India’s ‘blood sacrifice’ would justify political concessions (an empty hope), those who served the King Emperor could be regarded as stooges and even traitors, even though Britain’s Indian army formed the basis of the army of the independent nations created in 1947. With national freedom dominating historical remembrance (and the gradations of popular history, folklore and myth surrounding it) not surprisingly statues of ‘freedom fighters’ occupy in India the ubiquitous place in the urban streetscape as do community war memorials in Australia and New Zealand. These figures encompass national heroes such as Jawaharlal Nehru or Mahatma Gandhi or local Congress leaders; but never anyone who served the Raj. The most martial figure is Subhas Chandra Bose, the creator of the Indian National Army in 1942 (whom many Indians still believe survived a plane crash in Taiwan in 1945). Though hardly an heroic figure in his baggy jodhpurs and spectacles, Bose represents the triumph of a largely bogus ‘freedom movement’ hero over actual military endeavour, but for the Raj.

4While every state or territory can find a part in the freedom struggle, military service was very unevenly distributed under the Raj. From the 1850s the workings of the long-standing British theory valorising ‘martial races’, which accorded a privileged standing to particular communities most living in the north and especially the north-west, ensured that most of India’s population were not accepted for military service. The army sought and celebrated the prowess of Sikhs, Jats, Dogras, Rajputs, Pathans and Baluchis and what it called ‘Punjabi Mussalmans’, and above all Gurkhas recruited from the vassal state of Nepal. It rejected the peoples of eastern and southern India, which with few exceptions (such as Bombay and Madras sappers and miners) it disdained as ‘un-martial’. During the Great War recruiting difficulties in the army’s massive expansion extended the range of communities regarded as ‘martial’, temporarily. The desire to cultivate dissident Bengal also prompted the recruitment of a Bengal volunteer battalion which served unhappily in Mesopotamia, the 49th Bengalees, a memorial to which stands in the heart of Calcutta University, ironically both the centre of recruiting for both the Bengal volunteers and the activists who became the heroes of independent India.1

5Pakistan’s popular and official memory of the Great War remains frustratingly opaque. British war graves in cantonment cemeteries were consolidated in what is now Pakistan, and war dead of the Great War remain in three cemeteries, in Karachi and Rawalpindi. These – known significantly as ‘Gorah Qabrastaan’ (‘Foreign Cemetery’) – are not even sign-posted as Commonwealth War Graves Commission sites, so sensitive is the presence of Christian burial grounds in an Islamic republic. At Partition in 1947 the Muslim portion of the Indian Army became the basis of the Pakistan Army, and its units retain a strong institutional memory of their history as part of the army of undivided India. On anecdotal evidence many units of the Pakistan Army evidently know and cherish their part in the Great War, but beyond the army Pakistan’s awareness of its military history focuses entirely upon its defence of the Islamic Republic. There appears to be even less popular awareness of or interest in the longer history of the army’s antecedents. Like much of the argument of this chapter, that tentative conclusion needs to be explored and tested.

6Otherwise, memory of the Great War plays virtually no part in the history of other South Asian nations, Bhutan, Nepal, Bangla Desh or Sri Lanka. War has been a part of all of their experience; in the case of Bangla Desh responsible for its origin, and marked by a large memorial, the Jatiyo Smriti Soudho, completed in 1982. Sri Lanka was traumatised by a 26-year civil war (1983-2009) which has produced many memorials. Bhutan, though the least warlike of any South Asian nation, has created what is arguably the region’s most extensive war memorial, the huge 108 Buddhist chorten at Donchela Pass. Erected in 2004 on a hillock on the highway between Paro and Thimpu, they commemorate the Bhutanese troops killed in clashes with Indian Assamese separatist insurgents in December 2003. The participation of King Jigme Singye Wangchuck in dislodging and defeating the insurgents especially prompted Queen Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuk to mark her son’s victory and to commemorate the approximately 35 members of the Royal Bhutanese Army killed in the operations. In this richness of commemoration and dialogue between past and present, the Great War arguably remains remote in all but India.

The Great War: mass slaughter and individual remembrance

7The Great War confronted the Indian Army with its most severe test since the 1857 mutiny-rebellion and the upheavals that followed. In the decade before the war the army had been re-organised to form a number of expeditionary forces to serve the empire outside India (while maintaining its function in defending British India, especially on the north-west frontier, and in being available to suppress internal unrest). In 1914 five ‘forces’ were organised and despatched from India within weeks of the war’s outbreak. The largest, Force A, went to the Western Front, where Indian troops entered action in October 1914. The others comprised B and C in East Africa, D in Mesopotamia and E in Egypt. The Indians who fought on Gallipoli, who were sent from Force E, became Force G.

8Among British troops, mass slaughter in an overwhelmingly citizen army produced a revolution in the way dead soldiers were commemorated. It became clear to Fabian Ware, an educational reformer who worked as a Red Cross volunteer in France, that the British army had no clear or consistent policy for managing solders’ burials (beyond the obvious considerations of public health). By the end of 1914 he had made his special responsibility the recording of graves, succeeded in forming a graves service in 1915 and in 1917 gained a Royal Warrant to create an Imperial War Graves Commission, renamed the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 1960. This decisively altered the relationship between the state and individuals: from 1914 British empire service personnel were to be commemorated officially and formally – and individually.

9Conscious of mass death but also of the individual value and the diversity of the armies whose dead he sought to commemorate, Fabian Ware and his colleagues insisted on the principle of ‘equality of treatment’ for the empire’s dead.2 This not only meant that officers and men would be treated equitably (formerly officers had often been buried separately to their men, and early in the war some officers’ bodies were repatriated by families able to afford it). It also came to imply that the armies of the empire would be treated equitably; that all would be accorded either a dignified, identifiable grave or a name on memorials to the ‘missing’. While virtually all the troops of Britain and the ‘white’ dominions could be regarded as coming from nominally Christian societies which could be treated identically (with the exception of their Jewish minorities), the Indian Army offered the Commission serious challenges. How would India’s war dead be treated within this essentially Christian scheme?

10In early 1918 the India Office invited representatives of India’s major faiths to provide advice. British officials explained that the imperial government planned to commemorate India’s war dead in accordance with their religious sensibilities.3 The representatives (all senior civilians) stressed the importance of the requirements of their faiths, that Hindus and Sikhs should be cremated, and that Muslim soldiers graves should be left where they were. All three wanted temples, gurudwaras or mosques in the larger war cemeteries. While unwilling to erect places of worship in any cemetery (for any faith) the Imperial War Graves Commission acknowledged Indian sensibilities and took them into account in designing cemeteries and memorials. In this the Commission sought and largely accepted the guidance of senior British officers of the Indian Army.

11Britain’s Indian armies had demonstrated a profound respect for their members’ religious and cultural sensibilities – at least since the 1857 mutiny-rebellion demonstrated the perils of ignoring them. Indian units had always, for example, scrupulously observed their various communities’ dietary prescriptions, and encouraged and facilitated religious observances though British officers had left to ‘native’ officers the disposal of the remains of their co-religionists in accordance with religious customs. In keeping with the British Indian army’s regard for its members’ scruples, the Commission adopted a policy in which Muslim graves would be left undisturbed, ‘except where there was the slightest apprehension of the grave being removed [that is, lost]’, a qualification that enabled their consolidation into cemeteries. ‘Hindoo’ and Sikh remains (which encompassed Gurkhas) were to be cremated in the presence of men of the relevant faith and scattered. The policy was pragmatic rather than purist – a senior British Indian officer who knew the state of remains on the battlefield advised that when ‘Hindoo and Moslems are mixed up together, and unidentified [many units included men of both faiths] a decision should be made as to which shall be ignored’.

12The Indian Army was of course affected by the adoption of this policy. Its practice of leaving interment, the marking of graves and their maintenance in the hands of units’ Indian officers, was modified and superseded by an empire-wide policy. It should be emphasised that the Indian Army had largely known who of its members had been killed or wounded – its bureaucracy, inherited from the East India Company, ensured that the army maintained exact records of their fate. What changed during the Great War was how the army publicly acknowledged those deaths, and how fully it was able to implement the Commission’s policy. The sheer scale of the Indian army’s expansion and losses militated against equitable commemoration. The army’s record-keeping largely coped with the army’s massive and swift expansion in the war’s early years. However, from about 1916, by which time the army had expanded from about 200,000 combatants to nearly a million, the system of record-keeping suffered such severe impairment that it actually affected the way Indian dead could be identified and commemorated. Conversely, however, for campaigns fought before 1916, on the Western Front and on Gallipoli, the Indian Army’s record-keeping enabled it to know and commemorate exactly and by name each one of its war dead. The 1600 Indian troops who died on or as a result of the Gallipoli campaign, for example, are all recorded individually and by name on the Cape Helles memorial to the missing at the foot of the Gallipoli peninsula.4

‘… and 65 other Indian soldiers’ Anonymity and commemoration

13The Indian Army expanded several-fold during the Great War, eventually fielding the bulk of British empire troops in Mesopotamia, its largest single commitment, as well as forces in East Africa and the Middle East. The expansion entailed stresses unknown in the smaller peace-time regular force. Heavy losses impelled massive recruitment, often among communities and ethnic groups previously unwelcome in the army, and the appointment of British officers who did not know their men or their languages. A military bureaucracy developed to minutely document and regulate a small professional force struggled and eventually failed to control a much larger force. As the Imperial War Graves Commission began ‘consolidating’ tens of thousands of battlefield burials into larger cemeteries and constructing memorials to the missing, it became clear that the Indian Army’s records would make difficult the meticulous documentation of war dead that was usual in British and other dominion forces. By the mid-1920s the Imperial War Graves Commission decided that while Indian memorials in Europe would list by name all Indian dead who had no known grave, elsewhere it would not. The effect of this decision was that the memorials at Neuve Chapelle, in France, and Cape Helles (on Gallipoli, literally on the very edge of Europe) would name every one of the Indian dead not otherwise buried in identifiable graves in those theatres. Memorials elsewhere, in East Africa, Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East, would not. The most egregious consequence of this decision was that on the large memorial at Basra, to the dead of the Mesopotamian campaign – the Indian Army’s largest single campaign – the Indian dead were overwhelmingly not named. The reason, according to an Imperial War Graves Commission graves register in 1931, was that ‘the records were imperfectly kept’.5 While the dead are surely remembered within families, villages and faith communities, little institutional or official effort was directed to their remembrance beyond the monuments of the Imperial War Graves Commission, which were impossibly remote from the lives of peasants in, say, the Punjab, Haryana or Rajputana.

14Over 40,000 British empire dead are commemorated on the Basra memorial, dedicated in 1927, but the great majority of them were and remain merely numbers. British and Indian officers are named (as are British other ranks, some 8000 of them) but the dead of each Indian unit are given only in numbers. So, for example, the Indian dead of the 83rd Wallajahabad Light Infantry are recorded as ‘Subedar Major Narasimhlu and 65 other Indian soldiers’. The Imperial War Graves Commission’s decision not to inscribe sepoys’ names on the panels at Basra looks like the unexamined racism characteristic of the empire eight decades ago. It might have been argued – it might still be argued – that none of the sepoys’ families were ever likely to see their sons or husbands’ names on the memorial. But neither were many of the thousands of the named British soldiers’ families. The ironic truth is that despite the Indian Army’s record-keeping travails the Imperial War Graves Commission did by 1947 clarify a more-or-less exact listing of the names of all of those commemorated on the memorial. Not only are the details of all the Indian dead posted on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s website, but the Commission has mounted a special display on the Basra memorial at its head office in Maidenhead, including the memorial registers, the pages of which are turned daily.

15One reason for this remedial attention is that the memorial was originally sited on the Shatt el Arab waterway at Basra, the scene of fighting between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s and a site of continuing tension. In 1997 the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein directed that it be removed 32 kilometres to the north. At immense cost and labour the entire memorial was disassembled and re-erected in a bare desert on the road to Nasiriya. Due to the continuing insurgency and instability following the 2003 invasion of Iraq the memorial remains virtually inaccessible; hence the display in Maidenhead.

16The desire to remember the empire’s war dead resulted in not just a vast number of cemeteries, but a number of major war memorials. The creation of memorials was of particular relevance for India because most of its members were either of faiths which cremated their dead (Hindus and Sikhs) or which interred dead but did not necessarily mark graves. Accordingly, of India’s 72,000 Great War dead only 8,054 were accorded identified graves, with the rest being commemorated upon memorials.6 This distribution between ‘buried’ and ‘commemorated’ was exacerbated by the fact that a large proportion of war dead, about a third in the First World War, were posted ‘missing’, because bodies could often not be found or identified. The combination of major Indian faiths’ preference for cremation and the high proportion of ‘missing’ in the Great War enhanced the importance of a number of major memorials to Indian war dead, and it is through them that Indian commemoration can best be understood. These memorials comprise ones at Brighton, Neuve Chapelle, India Gate (New Delhi), the Lascar War Memorial (Kolkata) and the various Gurkha memorials.

17Serious Indian casualties among Force A, on the Western Front, were treated in Britain and a major military hospital for the Indian Corps opened in Brighton, Sussex, at the Royal Pavilion, presumably a clumsy attempt to make Indian soldiers feel at home in a supposedly familiar environment (though in fact the elaborate pavilion was mostly for show: most Indian wounded were accommodated in a converted parish workhouse nearby).7 Muslim dead (21 men) were buried at the Shah Jehan mosque at Woking, Surrey, while 53 Hindu and Sikh dead were cremated at a site on the Sussex Downs outside Brighton. The site of the cremations was later marked by the erection of a ‘Chhattri’, a marble Mughal-style ‘umbrella’ that has become one of the main memorials in Britain to Indians’ service in the Great War.8 Recently renovated with British ‘Great War centenary’ funding, it has become one of the main sites of ‘Indian’ commemoration among the Indian diaspora communities in Britain today, and especially among British Sikhs, who formed a large proportion of the Indian army’s strength.

18The main Indian Great War memorial in Europe is at Neuve Chapelle, 20 kilometres from Lille, located near the scene of the Indian Corps’ main action in France, in March 1915. It commemorates the names of 4,843 of the 8,557 deaths the corps suffered in France (Indian infantry served in France and Belgium for about fourteen months from late 1914, while Indian cavalry remained in France for the entire war). Some 3,293 other Indian Army soldiers are buried or commemorated in 141 cemeteries, while 421 Indian names appear on the great memorial to the missing at Ypres, killed in the fighting around Ypres late in 1914 but who have no known grave. ‘Indian’ in these figures includes European members of the army – their British officers and the warrant officers, NCOs and men who served in its fighting units or administrative services. The ‘Indian’ Army was always a multi-ethnic entity, and it is as difficult as it is invidious to separate its members out ethnically.

19The iconography of the Neuve Chapelle memorial, with its Star of India, Asoka pillar and tiger statues, was regarded as possessing a ‘particularly Indian feeling’.9 At the same time, the Imperial War Graves Commission made a great effort, as the Commission acknowledged in the booklet published to mark its unveiling, to ensure that ‘all religious symbols have been carefully avoided’.10 This means that unlike the great majority of Commission cemeteries, Neuve Chapelle lacks the usual prominent and emphatically Christian ‘Cross of Sacrifice’. The Commission was also careful that cemeteries in Islamic countries, such as Egypt, Turkey and Mesopotamia, the cross would be rendered discreetly, screened by walls or trees.

20In New Delhi, the ‘India Gate’ memorial has become India’s main site of war commemoration in general. The imposing memorial arch was, however, created as the memorial to 13,000 members of the British and Indian armed services who died in operations or otherwise during the Great War and in conflicts in its immediate aftermath, notably the Third Anglo-Afghan war of 1919. It was designed in a mock-Mughal ‘Indo-Saracenic’ style by Sir Edward Lutyens, the main architect of the British imperial capital of New Delhi, and the designer of war cemeteries and memorials elsewhere. The gate, dedicated in the presence of the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, in February 1931, was at first known as the ‘All-India War Memorial’. As was the Imperial War Graves Commission’s practice, the memorial arch is covered by the names of service men (and one woman, a nurse), listed in order of rank unit-by-unit, without distinction of race (or, indeed of religion or nationality: it includes the names of many Muslim soldiers of Undivided India whose units in 1947 became part of the Pakistan Army). After independence the memorial became the location of the Amar Jawan Jyoti, or the ‘flame of the immortal soldier’, installed after a third Indo-Pakistan war in 1971, and frequent ceremonies marking anniversaries and memorial services for the armed services of independent India. Ironically, its prominent location on Rajpath, in the heart of ceremonial New Delhi, and its use as a site of high value to India’s armed forces made it from about 2001 a potential terrorist target, and visitors are now prevented by military guards from approaching the memorial arch, and can no longer easily read the names on it.

21One of India’s few ‘private’ memorials illuminates the complexity of war commemoration spanning the Raj and after. In 1924 British shipping companies based in Calcutta combined to build what became known as the Lascar War Memorial, a thirty-metre tall tower beside the River Hoogly, now beside the Vidyasgar Setu, the second Hoogly bridge. Indian seamen, often Muslims from Bengal and what is now Bangla Desh, were traditionally known as ‘lascars’, nearly 900 of whom perished in British ships torpedoed or otherwise lost in British merchant vessels sunk all over the world. The companies’ gesture reflected that however poorly lascars were paid, their service was at least acknowledged. With the demise of British shipping concerns world-wide, the passing of the generation of managers and officers who knew of the lascars’ war service and a growing Indian indifference to those who had served the Raj, the Lascar War Memorial fell into disrepair. In the mid-1990s it was restored under the auspices of the Indian Navy and retired naval officer Commodore B.K. Mohanti, and is now functioning as both a memorial and as a focus for community events in the popular riverside esplanade. Other notable Indian ‘private’ memorials include those erected in or by the princely states to their forces that served overseas with the Indian Army. They include the pink memorial in Patiala, Punjab, to the men of the Maharaja of Patiala’s regiments who served in Egypt, Gallipoli and Palestine, and the ‘Teen Murti’ (‘three statues’) monument outside what is now the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, which commemorates the Hyderabad, Mysore and Jodhpur lancer regiments which served in the Middle East.

22Nepal was not formally a part of Britain’s Indian empire, but it became a client state after its defeat in 1814. Nepalese ‘Gurkhas’ soon after became part of the East India Company’s army and during the Great War, Nepalese battalions relieved Indian units for active service, and the large force of Gurkhas recruited directly into the Indian Army served as mercenaries. Nepal’s war dead were therefore also commemorated by the Imperial War Graves Commission in India and elsewhere (about half of the 1600 ‘Indians’ named on the Cape Helles memorial are Gurkhas). Richard Goulden, a prominent British sculptor, produced figures of Gurkhas in India at Kunraghat in 1928 (in Gorrukpur, the Gurkhas’ main depot in India). Gouden’s figure was later adapted for a statue in the India Office, later the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in London, and in 1997 was reinterpreted and enlarged by sculptor Philip Jackson for the Gurkha memorial in London, a reflection of Britain’s continuing relationship with Gurkhas, now part of the British army.

23While by the early twenty-first century India had virtually lost interest in its role in the Great War, the Indian diaspora, especially into Britain, had stimulated awareness of India’s part. Seeking greater social inclusion, British government and its agencies (such as the Imperial War Museum and the armed forces) made a greater effort to acknowledge the service of its Asian, African and Caribbean minorities in the world wars especially. ‘Black History Week’ and similar programs saw talks, exhibitions and events, while moves began to create memorials acknowledging their contributions. In November 2002 memorial gates were unveiled on Constitution Hill (outside Buckingham Palace) recognising the service of some five million men and women from ‘Undivided India, Africa and the Caribbean’ in the two world wars. The centenary of the Great War saw further memorials, such as the Sikh Soldier Memorial dedicated at the National Arboretum at Alrewas, Staffordshire, in November 2015, which was funded by subscription among Britain’s Sikh community. Memorials honouring Sikhs are now proposed for other cities, including Coventry, Derby and Bristol. In Australia members of a growing Indian community (now the single largest and fastest-growing migrant group) both take part in Anzac Day marches and in Queensland have begun working for the construction of an ‘Indian Australian War Memorial’. Expatriate connection with Indian martial endeavour is strongest in the Sikh community but relatively weak among Muslim immigrants.

‘Long live martyrs’: Great War commemoration and the centenary

24Though neglected for decades, India’s heritage in the Great War at least has recently become used as part of India’s ‘soft diplomacy’. Prolonged attempts by the United Service Institution of India (USII) to interest the Indian government in war commemoration, and especially by the Secretary of its Centre for Armed Forces Historical Research, Squadron Leader Rana Chhina, eventually began to show results. From about 2011 the Ministry of External Affairs began to see value in India commemorating its Great War history on a greater scale, if nowhere as great as other Commonwealth nations. War commemoration, at least of wars a century ago, provides a congenial basis for relationships involving much deeper, current and pressing concerns. The Indian presence on the Western Front, long manifest only in the formal and passive commemoration of war cemeteries and memories, was from 2011 renewed, beginning with the dedication of a small memorial (based on the Asoka lions on India’s crest) on the ramparts at Ypres/ Ieper in Belgium.11

25The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of Narendra Modi, elected just before the Great War centenary began in 2014, also proved to be responsive to suggestions that India should acknowledge its part in the Great War, presumably as a ceremonial pretext for dialogue. In April 2015 Prime Minister Modi visited the Neuve Chapelle memorial, the first Indian premier to do so. There he extolled the ‘dedication, loyalty, courage and sacrifice’ of India’s soldiers, which had ‘won the admiration of the world’. He saluted them, leading chants of ‘Vande Mataram’ (‘Venerate the Mother [India]’) and ‘shaheed amar rahein’ (‘long live martyrs’).12 Though the Indian Army of the Great War was a multi-faith force, Modi’s sectarian vision particularly celebrates its Hindu component.

26Under the leadership of Squadron Leader Chhina and the United Service Institution of India, India has embarked upon an extensive program of ceremonial visits, conferences and other engagements marking the war’s centenary. The USII has been involved in some fifty events in 2014-2016, in India but also in Australia, Bangla Desh, Belgium, Britain and France, including a major partnership with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, ‘Forever India’. While this partly comes out of Rana Chhina’s extraordinary energy and commitment, it is also apparent that he has struck a responsive chord. The publication of several books re-interpreting India’s experience of the war – many more than had appeared for decades previously – has presumably helped to seed interest among journalists, civil servants, military officers, the powerful retired military community and India’s middle class generally. The only notable qualification to be made is that the interest appears to be manifest among ex-service and ‘martial’ communities (notably Sikhs and other groups largely located in India’s north-west) with connections to groups recruited by the army in 1914 rather than across in nation as a whole. A survey of 200 war memorials published by the Ministry of External Affairs shows that while war memorials now exist in virtually all states and union territories, many erected by the armed services on active military bases, memorials are largely concentrated in the very areas that sustained the Raj’s armed forces. Whether India’s greater regard for the commemoration of the Great War comes out of the individual energy of advocates such as Rana Chhina or out of a desire to exploit war memory in the cause of foreign policy goals, remains to be explored.

27If India has acted to recognise India’s part in the Great War, by contrast, Pakistan continues to ignore if not deprecate its pre-1947 military heritage. The Pakistan armed forces have taken a conspicuously greater part in the nation’s governance (not least through three successful military coups in 1958, 1977 and 1999) and while individual military units remain proud of their pre-1947 heritage, public and official commemoration in Pakistan focuses on post-1947. Details of memorials in Pakistan are harder to find: the Pakistan Army seems much less interested in its pre-1947 history than is its Indian counterpart. Attempts to establish the extent of war commemoration in Pakistan for this chapter proved unavailing, itself a significant result.

Conclusion

28So much a part of the exploration of the relationships between war and society elsewhere, the study of war commemoration in South Asia remains an oddly neglected but portentous endeavour.13 The relationship between war and commemoration in India and associated nations before and after 1947, a subject hitherto astonishingly neglected, is fecund in illuminating the way war memory has been shaped by broader movements in those polities.