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. Combining archival excavation 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.

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