Book at Lunchtime: India, Empire and First World War Culture

TORCH Book at Lunchtime event on India, Empire and First World War
Culture by Professor Santanu Das. Held on 20th November 2019. Based
on ten years of research, Santanu Das's India, Empire, and First
World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs recovers the
sensuous experience of combatants, non-combatants and civilians
from undivided India in the 1914-1918 conflict and their
socio-cultural, visual, and literary worlds. Around 1.5 million
Indians were recruited, of whom over a million served abroad. Das
draws on a variety of fresh, unusual sources - objects, images,
rumours, streetpamphlets, letters, diaries, sound-recordings,
folksongs, testimonies, poetry, essays, and fiction - to produce
the first cultural and literary history, moving from recruitment
tactics in villages through sepoy traces and feelings in
battlefields, hospitals, and POW camps to post-war reflections on
Europe and empire. Combining archival excavation in different
countries across several continents with investigative readings of
Gandhi, Kipling, Iqbal, Naidu, Nazrul, Tagore, and Anand, this
imaginative study opens up the worlds of sepoys and labourers, men
and women, nationalists, artists, and intellectuals, trying to make
sense of home and the world in times of war. Panel commentators
will include Dr Yasmin Khan, Professor Laura Marcus, and Professor
Jay Winter.