INDIA, EMPIRE, AND FIRST WORLD WAR CULTURE

Based on ten years of research, santanu Das' India, empire, and first World War culture: subtitle: literature, 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. More than 1. 5 million Indians were recruited. Das draws on a variety of fresh, unusual sources - objects, images, rumours, street-pamphlets, sound recordings, folksongs, testimonies, poetry, essays and fiction - to produce the first major 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 the empire.