Last Sunday's moving ceremony at Kolkata's Lascar War Memorial - which must be unique in India - captured the poignant mood of the worldwide remembrance of what was called the war to end all wars. Yet, even while enjoying Eastern Naval Command Band playing Anchors Aweigh, I couldn't forget that we were commemorating someone else's occasion.
Colonials often identify with the metropole. That is understandable in this instance since more than 74,000 Indians died in World War I. The windswept loneliness of a white cupola (Chhatri) above the Sussex Downs, the domes and minarets of Brighton's Royal Pavilion, and Singapore's sparkling Outram Park metro station remind us they were history's sacrifice. No wonder Kolkata is indifferent to whether the College Square memorial commemorates 49 Bengalis or the disbanded "49th Bengalee Regiment" in which Kazi Nazrul Islam served.
Like Lalu in Mulk Raj Anand's novel, Across the Black Waters, Indian soldiers were "conscripts, brutalised and willing to fight like trained bulls, but without a will of their own, soulless automations in the execution of the army code, though in the strange dark deeps of their natures, unschooled by the Sarkar, there lay the sensitiveness of their own humanity, their hopes, their fears and their doubts".
The starkly elegant 90-year-old Lascar Memorial, under which Commodore Ravi Ahluwalia hosted Sunday's concert and dinner, honours 896 merchant seamen (lascars) killed in action. Brighton Pavilion became a hospital for wounded Indian soldiers, 53 of whom were cremated at the Chhatri. Singapore's Outram Park enshrines a macabre memory. A firing squad massacred 47 soldiers there after the all-Muslim 5th Light Infantry decided the war wasn't theirs and mutinied.
About 1.3 million Indians signed up. Recruitment "greatly surpassed all expectations", wrote the historian, L F Rushbrook Williams. The London Times wondered at Indians without blood ties with Britain rallying so handsomely to its defence. Queen Victoria's son, the Duke of Connaught, noted that "the splendid fighting qualities" that had made Lalu's Punjab a "household word".
Two reasons impelled them. First, like today's emigrants - Silicon Valley billionaires, Oxbridge dons or labourers in Malaysia - they were soldiers of fortune. Second, nationalist leaders repaid Britain's promise of swaraj after the war with India's flesh and blood. "Seek ye first the Recruiting Office, and everything will be added unto you," urged Gandhi who raised an ambulance unit and was rewarded with Britain's Kaiser-i-Hind medal.
There were some compelling individual motives. An ace pilot with the Royal Air Force, Indra Lal (Laddie) Roy, great-uncle of NDTV's Prannoy Roy, the only Indian to receive a posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross, achieved 10 "kills" before he was shot down in France aged only 19. Another heroic pilot, H S Malik, survived to become a distinguished diplomat after independence. Kunal Chandra Sen enlisted because the social round bored him, and wrote a racy chronicle Through War, Rebellion and Riot. The Nizam of Hyderabad donated Rs 60 lakh and two regiments in hopes of being promoted to "His Majesty".
But most "saved the sum of things for pay" as in Housman's Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries.
They deserve respect but with some understanding of the war and India's part in it. Kunwar Natwar Singh is absolutely right in saying Indians have no sense of history. The word "lascar" was unfamiliar to many of Sunday's guests. Many knew nothing of the Poppy Day of my childhood when memsahibs collected money around Park Street and Chowringhee and even less of Flanders fields where "the poppies blow/ Between the crosses, row on row" in John McRae's poem. They were appallingly ignorant of naval ranks. Some who had attended another ceremony at the Maidan Cenotaph had no idea that insensitive authority has desecrated the serenity of Herbert William Palliser's design by outlining bricks on the sandstone surface.
World War I didn't threaten us. The Kaiser was agreeable to Britain ruling the waves and India providing Germany had the run of Europe. National rivalry and family friction (the English and German monarchs being first cousins) wouldn't permit that, and India had to go to war because Britain did. But that interests party-going Indians even less than the fate of more than 74,000 Lalus who perished for Britain's empire. Commemoration is just another occasion for cocktails, except for Ahluwalia and the three gifted conductors, Lt-Cmdr Satish Champion, Master Chief Petty Officer P K Tamang and Chief Petty Officer Rajan Suresh.
Was I alone in marvelling at India's wondrous unity in diversity that enables a Tamang - a Tibetan horseman - to conduct stirring music for the Navy in Kolkata?
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
