Even in death the faiths of the Indians were accommodated. The cremation of the dead required by the Sikh and Hindi faiths was, in theory, prohibited by the Cremation Act of 1902. However, the Home Office waived the law and three traditional cremation ghats were constructed on the South Downs outside Brighton. Between 31 December 1914 and 30 December 1915, fifty-three Sikh and Hindu soldiers were cremated there, their ashes scattered on the waters of the English Channel. The site where the cremations took place is today marked by the Chattri Monument, which has become the site of an annual act of remembrance. Similarly a Muslim cemetery was established at Horsell Common, near Woking, where the only mosque in Britain had been built. The remains of nineteen Muslim ‘Tommies’ of the First World War still lie in the cemetery, which is accessed through a Indian-style pavilion gate. Other Muslims who died in British hospitals were buried at the Brookwood Military Cemetery in Surrey.
The medical facilities and the medical care of Indian troops at the Pavilion Hospital were just as good as those provided to British troops elsewhere and far superior to those the Indians had known in the regimental hospitals in India itself. The hospital had two operating theatres and X-ray facilities. Mortality rates were low and recovery rates high. There were plenty of staff members, many of whom were rushed in from India to work as orderlies, dressers, cooks and clerks. Their numbers were bolstered after November 1914 when a little-known Indian lawyer, living in London, had a letter published in The Times in which he appealed ‘to the Indian young men residing in the United Kingdom to enlist without delay’ to work as orderlies at the Indian military hospitals: ‘In my humble opinion,’ wrote Gandhi, ‘it ought to be a proud privilege to nurse the Indian soldiers back to health.’71 Two-hundred Indians who had been studying and working in Britain when war broke out responded to his appeal. They worked not just as orderlies, but also as interpreters, easing the flow of information between the patients and the medical staff.72
Patients’ letters, also transcribed by the Censor of Indian Mails, suggest that the Indians, both patients and staff, were impressed by their surroundings and the medical facilities in Brighton. One soldier wrote home to his family from his bed at the Pavilion Hospital: ‘Do not worry about me, for I am in paradise. The King came down here last week and shook hands with all the Indians, and asked each one about his wounds and sufferings and gave consolation to each.’ At the end of January 1915 a medical subordinate, in a letter to a friend in India, wrote: ‘In my opinion it would not be amiss to describe England as a paradise on earth. In the evenings we always go for a walk. The people treat us very well indeed. Men & women alike greet us with smiling faces and take great pleasure in talking with us.’73 To ensure that the flow of such positive reports bound for Indian eyes continued unabated, the patients at the Indian Military Hospitals were provided with copious amounts of free writing paper and envelopes.
After four months of the hospital’s operation, The Times was pleased to report that:
All… difficulties have been overcome… The results are worth the trouble. They seemed a cheerful and kindly set these dark-skinned patients of many races and creeds, as, clothed in the same hospital kit as issued to the British wounded, but clinging always to their turbans or their long hair, they sit in the sunny gardens, or wait in their turn for a ‘joy-ride’ and a visit to a cinematograph, or get their strength back in light fatigue duty. The visitor feels in the atmosphere the smooth running of a complicated machine.74
Yet the ‘complicated machine’ inevitably contained stresses on the conventional relationships of empire. While the differences of caste and faith within the Indian Army had been addressed through the clever design of the converted buildings, and written into the administrative cultures of the institutions, the relationships between colonized and colonizer were to prove more difficult to sustain. The most acute issues were those connected to the roles of women. Within months of its outbreak, the First World War, like no event before it, placed colonized men in positions of contact and intimacy with white women – circumstances that would never have been permitted within the colonies themselves. It also brought black- and brown-skinned men into contact with working-class white women, a group who were largely absent from the colonies, where menial work was done by local people. As in the military zones behind the lines in France and Belgium, where men of many races encountered local women as both civilians and nurses, the Indian military hospitals in Britain became places in which the boundaries of race, power and sexuality became disturbingly blurred. One taboo – against deploying non-white troops in a war between white Europeans – had already been broken; another great taboo of empire, the deep opposition – even visceral revulsion – against contact between white women and non-white men was now under threat. A powerful mystique had been deliberately built up around white women in Africa and Asia, which placed them strictly beyond the reach of male colonial subjects. (The relationship between white male colonizers and local dark-skinned women was, by contrast, frowned upon but tolerated as an inevitable by-product of the imperial venture.)
Even before the hospitals were fully active, the idea of white English nurses caring for Indian soldiers, with all the inevitable intimacies that involved, was regarded as a matter of deep concern – so much so that in November 1914 a directive of the Army Council banned the employment of white English women on wards where Indians were treated. Although the ban quickly proved unworkable, and some hospitals found reasons to side-step it, the compromise many institutions adopted was to permit white nurses to work on the wards but only in supervisory capacities – this was aimed as much at preventing them doing menial tasks for men who were their supposed racial inferiors as it was intended to reduce contact between the races. When, in May 1915, the Daily Mail published a picture of a white nurse standing by the bed of a wounded Indian soldier, a minor scandal erupted. The soldier in question turned out to be Khudadad Khan VC, the sepoy who had garnered his honour at the First Battle of Ypres; while there was no suggestion of any impropriety, the picture may have influenced the Army Council in its issuing of another order, a month later, for the removal of all white nurses from three of the Indian military hospitals. The army was, however, unable to enforce its rules on privately run facilities.
Army authorities were equally concerned about the other forms of contact between the Indian wounded and white women. The patients received a great number of visitors, including white women, many of them well-born ladies involved in charitable work. The greatest threat, however, was identified not as these middle- and upper-class ladies, but rather the working-class women of Brighton and the other hospital towns into which the patients made trips, usually under the watchful eye of British officers. As it had been hoped that the sea and sea air might in some way aid their recovery, it seemed perverse to deny Indians the opportunity to take walks along the sea front; but the excursions caused alarm. Outings to the cinema and theatre seemed equally fraught. The ever watchful Censor’s office was alert to any encounters with, or opinions about, white women in the Indians’ letters – despite the fact that most references were innocent in the extreme. One soldier wrote: ‘The women here have no hesitation in walking with us. They do so hand in hand. The men so far from objecting encourage them.’75 Another recounted how he was ‘standing outside a shop when someone touched my cheek. I thought it must be some old dear friend; but when I turned my face who should I see but a lady with a grand dress on and an ostrich feather, laughing.’76 Other Indians, far from being the potential sexual predators of the authorities’ nightmares, were themselves scandalized by British sexual mores. A Maratha clerk at Bournemouth wrote to his friend in the Indian city of Sholapur, in March 1915, describing his acceptance of the shocking fact that ‘The men & women of this country go about boldly hand in hand. We feel ashamed, but such is the custom of the country. It suffices if one has a very slight acquaintance. They even some with us [sic] walks thus.’77 All three of these letters caught the eye of the Censor, and any ment
ions or subtle hints at intimacies between Indian men and white women were excised from the letters of both Indian soldiers and staff.
Back in the 1840s, Queen Victoria had taken against the Royal Pavilion as a summer retreat because it lacked the privacy she sought for her growing family. By 1915 the Indian patients at the Pavilion Hospital might well have felt themselves subject to a comparable level of intrusion. In its first months of operation it became something of a tourist attraction. Day-trippers came down from London to see ‘the Indians’, and tram rides along the sea front now had the added benefit of offering a clear, if fleeting, view of the Indians convalescing on the Pavilion’s lawns. The authorities’ solution to what was seen as excessive contact between the Indian wounded and the people of the hospital towns was to effectively turn the hospitals into closed facilities. Fences were built around the Pavilion Hospital, and the walls that already surrounded the Kitchener Hospital – as a former workhouse – were made more imposing by the addition of barbed wire. This, unsurprisingly, proved to be a less than insuperable obstacle to men who had months earlier stormed barbed-wire entanglements on the Western Front. Ultimately, at both the Pavilion and Kitchener hospitals, police guards were posted to keep the patients in and would-be visitors out. It took a contingent of forty-five policemen to keep the Pavilion Hospital sealed off from the people of Brighton. One hospitalized Sikh soldier complained to a friend serving in France at the end of January 1915: ‘They do not let me go outside this hospital at all, nor do they allow even the men of one’s own village [to] come in to see one. There are British soldiers posted as sentries all round the hospital who neither permit us to go out or outsiders to come in.’78
With these tensions and difficulties brushed under the carpet, the splendour of the Pavilion Hospital and the high quality of the medical care dispensed there, along with the demonstrable British respect for the religious practices of their Indian servicemen, was a propaganda image that the British and Indian governments were keen to broadcast. Newspaper reports and photographs of the Royal Pavilion Hospital were distributed among Indian units at the front and within India itself. Images of recuperating Indian troops also made their way into American news reports. Postcards of various agreeable scenes of hospital life were produced, and Indian soldiers, on being discharged at the end of their treatment, were from late 1915 each given a copy of the Short History, which had been produced ‘solely for its effect in India’, containing its full-page photographic plates of the exterior of the building, with Indian soldiers milling around in the foreground, and a two-page image of the sea of beds arranged under the great dome.79 Every photograph reinforced the message that the king and queen cared so deeply for their Indian subjects that they had dedicated one of their palaces to their care. Thousands of copies of the Short History thus made their way back to India, in the hands of once-wounded soldiers or distributed freely by the India Office. It was available to residents of Brighton, too – but at a cost of a shilling.
On the second page of the Short History were full-length photo portraits of King George and Queen Mary, and pages 13–15 described their second royal visit to meet the Indian troops (25 August 1915), a much grander affair than their first visit in January 1915. By 1914, the ‘royal’ building was in fact owned by the Corporation of Brighton, and it had been Kitchener, not the king, who had pushed for it to be turned into a hospital for the Indians.80 None of these complicating details was permitted to muddy the waters of an otherwise clear propaganda message. The high point of the king’s second visit took place not beneath the great dome, but on the lawns outside the Pavilion. ‘The King had come,’ the Short History explained, ‘specially to decorate with his own hands, for conspicuous gallantry in the field, ten of his wounded Indian officers and one Indian non-commissioned officer. It was royal weather, and the investiture took place on the lawns on the west of the Pavilion, where over 1,000 wounded Indians were gathered to greet their King-Emperor.’
At the ceremony of investiture the recipients of eleven honours were brought forward one by one. ‘The first to be decorated was Jemadar Mir Dast, 55th Coke’s Rifles who had already won the Indian Order of Merit in India.’81 Before the 1,000 Indian patients, King George declared: ‘I have already bestowed with my own hands two VCs on Indian soldiers and I give this third cross with infinite pleasure. I earnestly hope that you will soon completely recover from your injuries and that you will live long to enjoy your honours.’82
As the soldier had the Victoria Cross pinned to his chest, in the summer sun on the west lawns of the Royal Pavilion, on the southern coast of England, his brother Jemadar Mir Mast, of the 58th Rifles – also a decorated war hero – was in Germany, working as an agent for the enemy.
Five months earlier, both brothers had been in the trenches. In the build-up to the attack at Neuve Chapelle, British preparations – though successfully concealed from the enemy – could not but signal to British and Indian troops that a major action was imminent. Battered units of the Indian Corps, not long recovered from the battles of November 1914 and the privations of the winter, began to sense their chances of survival once again diminish. On the night of 2/3 March, twenty-three men of the 58th Rifles, all of them Afridis from the Afghan frontier regions, crossed no man’s land and deserted to the Germans. They were led by Jemadar Mir Mast. This defection at Neuve Chapelle would be the greatest breakdown in loyalty among the Indian Corps in the whole war. Captain Howell, as Censor of Indian Mails, was well aware that some units were under severe stress. Just over a week before, on 23 February 1915, he reported on the ‘big picture’ of morale within the Indian Corps, cautioning that while it was difficult to ascertain the morale of an army from its letters alone, ‘I should certainly say that if the strain is not to reach breaking point the “door of hope” must be opened somewhere before long.’83
Many of the men who deserted were from the same village, and some were related to each other. To them, and to Mir Mast, preparations for Neuve Chapelle may well have been the final closure of Howell’s ‘door of hope’. The 58th Rifles had suffered as badly as any unit on the Western Front. They had taken part in numerous raids as well as larger assaults at Givenchy and Festubert. Their officers had been decimated, the regimental ‘family’ slowly disintegrating under the sheer weight of their losses. They had also demonstrated numerous acts of gallantry and fortitude in the face of constant bombardment in the Ypres sector. Mir Mast and another deserter, Azam Khan, had even recently won the Indian Distinguished Service Medal for courage in the face of the enemy. On 9 March 1915, while both men were in German hands, their names were appearing in the supplement to the London Gazette, listing them as soldiers to whom ‘His Majesty the KING-EMPEROR has been graciously pleased to approve of his undermentioned Rewards… for gallantry and devotion to duty whilst serving with the Indian Army Corps’.84
The obvious portents of another, and larger, attack might well have convinced Mir Mast and the others that there was no possible means of surviving the war other than to desert to the German lines. But there might have been other reasons. There was some speculation that the desertions had been motivated by aggrieved men who had been denied promotion. It also appears likely that the 58th Rifles had been exposed to anti-British and Indian nationalist propaganda in the form of leaflets that the Germans were managing to get across the lines. The details of Mir Mast’s interrogation by the Germans strongly suggest that he had seen such literature. Those interrogations were carried out by Dr Paul Walter, a former missionary who had lived in India and spoke the local languages, and who had been posted to Lille precisely to debrief and assess Indian soldiers who were captured or deserted. On 6 March, three days after having crossed over to the Germans, Mir Mast in his interrogation offered his advice to German propagandists, suggesting to Walter that the most effective message the Germans could disseminate in their leaflets was ‘“We’ll give you a Mauser pistol and a good German rifle.” That’s enough, all of them will come.’85
Stunn
ed by the scale of the defection, the British held an investigation, undertaken by the Indian Corps Intelligence and the British Army Court of Enquiry. It concluded that the desertions were sparked by personal grievances. However, as a precaution the British sent home some men who were related to the deserters as well as halting the recruitment of Afghans from the frontier provinces – and thereby opening up further cracks in the martial-races theory.86 As the British were investigating the mass desertion, Mir Mast was proving his value to his captors and new employers, by sketching a hand-drawn map of the Khyber Pass, which lay near his family home in the Tirah Valley on the Indian–Afghan border. He listed the positions and gave the rough numbers of the British troops that guarded this critical imperial artery. His extraordinary journey was, in some ways, only just beginning.
Between the Battle of Neuve Chapelle and the end of the year, the men of the Indian Corps had much else to endure. Photographs of their units taken late in 1915 are a stark contrast to the images that streamed from the camera of Horace Grant over a year earlier. The men in the later photographs have lost their formality as well as their naivety. No longer a Victorian army, they stand together in huddled groups rather than military lines. No two uniforms are alike. White officers and Indians stand alongside one another, the boundaries of race temporarily blurred, perhaps by shared horrors. All of them stare the camera down, some accusingly, some with haunted expressions.
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