Lost cause?

Around 7,000 Indian soldiers died in the battles in and around the town of Ieper during the First World War. Of these, the names and histories of only 413 are known. The rest lie in unmarked graves all over the Flemish countryside. When will they finally get their due?

Graves and bunkers are strewn around the fields that spread out from the Flemish town of Ieper. They glint in the chilly spring sunlight like discarded candy wrappings. The vistas are seemingly empty, but for the presence of hundreds of thousands of ghosts.

In the First World War, the countryside around Ieper (or Ypres as it is known in French) was transformed into a sea of gore as the town became the centre of intense and sustained battles between the German and Allied forces. The town was strategically located in the path of Germany’s planned sweep across Belgium and into France. Ieper was all but obliterated in the process.

 

Today, it has been painstakingly reconstructed into a site of pilgrimage for people from across Europe; a symbol of the hubris of war and a monument to remembrance. An inventive museum housed in the town’s rebuilt ‘cloth hall’ — the region was a centre of the medieval trade in textiles — is one of the means by which Ieper attempts to ensure that the horrors of the War are not forgotten.

The museum is a few minutes’ walk from Menin Gate, a commemorative arch on which the names of almost 55,000 soldiers whose graves remain unknown are inscribed. Designed by British architect Reginald Blomfield, a contemporary of Edwin Lutyens, it is widely held to be the model for New Delhi’s India Gate. Among the thousands of names running up the walls of the memorial are those of 413 members of the Indian Army Corps who went missing in the Ieper Salient.

But according to Dominiek Dendooven, a historian at the Ieper museum, this is only a fraction of the actual numbers of Indian soldiers who lost their lives here.

He recounts, as an example, how on April 26, 1915, 440 men of the 47th Sikh infantry regiment went into battle. Of these, 348 were lost. “But we only have 14 of their names inscribed on the Menin Gate. The rest have vanished from history.” For Dendooven, Ieper’s role as a memorial to the First World War remains flawed. “The history of the war, as it is commonly understood here, is a very Eurocentric one.” But, as Dendooven points out, more than 50 non-European countries were involved — the result of the use of colonial troops by the British and French.

Thus, even as Ieper serves as an imperative to ‘remember’, many tens of thousands are forgotten, among them the around 7,000 Indian soldiers who died in and around the area. You have to search hard to find traces of their stories in the debris of material remains from the time.

In a corner of Bedford House cemetery, one of the larger memorial parks in the vicinity, a cluster of 20-odd headstones marks a separate ‘Indian area’. The majority bear no name. Instead, there is only the terse, desolate sentence: “An Indian soldier of the Great War.”

How old was this soldier? Did that one have a wife waiting back home? Did he screw up his nose when he laughed? The stones stare back sternly, holding their secrets within. They sit apart from the rest of the cemetery, ensuring that in death, as in life, the men they commemorate remain ‘other’ to the colonial masters they fought for.

Indian troops were involved in the First World War’s Western Front over a 14-month-long period — primarily from the fall of 1914 to the end of 1915. The army divisions involved were the Lahore and Meerut Divisions as well as the Secunderabad Cavalry Brigade.

In Ieper, they were engaged in two bloody battles. The first took place over a week in late October-early November 1914, where the Indian soldiers served to reinforce British troops fighting an attempted German breakthrough to the channel ports. The second was in the last week of April 1915 during the infamous ‘second battle of Ieper’, in which the Germans used chlorine gas, marking the first time in history when a weapon of mass destruction was used. “In this case, to be blunt, the Indian troops were used as cannon fodder,” says Dendooven. “They were pushed into battle without any explanation of the situation.”

The Indian troops in Ieper were up against many odds. Unused to the harsh north European weather, and fighting an abstract enemy in what must have felt like a disorienting war to them, these sepoys, naiks and jemadars often found themselves led by officers who didn’t even speak their language — their regular commanding officers having been killed.

And even as they died for their colonisers, they were scoffed at for their efforts. “The colonial troops were always blamed when things went wrong,” says Dendooven. “These ‘weak, coloured soldiers’ were never considered on par with the ‘really good, white’ ones, although there is no evidence to show that there was any difference in the fighting performance of the two.”

By the end of 1915, Indian forces were ordered out of Europe. Their brief involvement on the Western Front had never been popular amongst the European authorities for a variety of reasons.

For one, the colonial governments were worried that the troops with experience of battle in Europe would return home to foment rebellion against their imperial overlords. Moreover, given that the founding premise of colonialism was the notion of white superiority, colonial troops fighting alongside Europeans, discovering thereby that white men were as vulnerable to death as coloured people, was unpalatable to many.

The Indian state, post independence, has not done much better. “Go to any country and it is proud of its armed forces,” says General Ashok K Mehta, who commanded the Indian Peace-Keeping Force in Sri Lanka. “Pride of place is given to its war memorials. There is none in post-independence India, which has fought more wars and insurgencies than any country in the last 80 years. Neither is there a war museum. It is politically callous and a national shame.”

For Dendooven, hunting down the stories of the individual Indians who fought on the Western Front has been a disheartening exercise. The stories of ‘coloured’ soldiers were almost never written down. The only exceptions were those who were decorated for great valour.

He cites the example of Khudadad Khan of the 129th Baluchis, who became the first Indian to be awarded the Victoria Cross. The sole survivor of his unit, Khudadad had relentlessly fired his machine gun for as long as possible despite serious injuries. He was later able to crawl back from the German line and rejoin his unit. Khudadad’s is the only biography of an Indian soldier to be found in the Ieper Museum today.

“We are always looking for sources of information but it’s so difficult,” explains Dendooven, revealing that in the decade and more that the museum has been open, he has only ever come across two relatives of Indian soldiers visiting the museum. Both were Sikhs, one from Canada and the other with relatives in the United Kingdom.

In his research, Dendooven has relied heavily on comments made by censors who took out ‘sensitive’ information from the letters written by Indian soldiers to those at home. These are available in British archives. Another unexpected source is recordings made by German ethnographers in prisoner-of-war camps.

On June 6, 1916, for example, Gurkha Jasbahadur Rai sang into the recording device of a Prussian phonographic mission: “…I do not want to stay in Europe, please take me home to India. The Gurkha eats lamb, but not duck. Alive we serve no purpose yet we cannot die…Back in my village I want to cut the grass in the fields. I want to leave this country.”

Jasbahadur died six months after this recording was made.

So what is the Indian government doing to ensure that the memory of the Indians who fought at Ieper is kept alive?

“It’s complicated,” replies Dendooven.

Of the soldiers who fought in Flanders, many were from places now in modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, which makes them less ‘interesting’ to India today. For the Pakistan government, the fact that they were considered to be ‘Indian’ troops muddies the water as well.

In 2002, a special memorial to the Indian army was erected besides Menin Gate with the support of the Indian government. A representative of the Indian embassy attends memorial services in Ieper every November 11, on Armistice Day.

General Mehta, however, calls it an “an incomplete memorial” since “it has only a few names of the martyrs. Only tracing the next of kin of the ‘Indian’ dead will compensate for the grievous omission,” he feels.

The real, albeit modest, interest in the Indians felled at Ieper comes from the Indian diaspora in Europe.

“It’s natural,” smiles Dendooven, “because Ieper is one of the few places where their [the diaspora’s] history and our [European] history intersects.”

ABOUT IEPER

Getting there: Direct trains from Brussels to Ieper depart every hour. The journey takes around one-and-a-half hours.

Brussels airport is 135 km away. Driving time from the airport to Ieper takes a little over one-and-a-half hours.

Places to stay: There are many places to stay in and around Ieper. A full list can be obtained from the Ypres tourist office:

Website: www.ieper.be  

Email: Toerisme@ieper.be  

Ieper Museum: The main museum in Ieper is called ‘In Flanders Fields’. It is located in the reconstructed building of the old Cloth Hall in the main market square. Opened in 1998, it is a modern interactive museum focused on the battles that took place in and around the town. It will be revamped soon with updated exhibits on the non-European involvement in the First World War.

Website: www.inflandersfields.be