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World War I: How British used letters of Indian soldiers for propaganda

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Shrabani Basu
Shrabani BasuNov 16, 2015 | 16:39

World War I: How British used letters of Indian soldiers for propaganda

On December 14, the first train arrived with 112 patients, mostly seriously injured, who had to be carried out on stretchers. The second train had 233 soldiers on board. It was a cold wet winter day when the trains pulled into Brighton station, but people had gathered to give the Indians a warm welcome.

Cheering crowds stood around as the soldiers were received by the mayor and other town officials. It had been a long journey from the frontline. Many of the severely wounded died on the way as it took nearly four days to reach England. Alighting at the seaside town must have seemed almost bizarre, a world so different from the trenches and shelling. This was the soldiers' first view of the mother country.

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Two hundred of the soldiers were sent to the pavilion and 145 to the York Place Hospital.

Those interred in the Royal Pavilion could not believe their eyes. In the Banquet Room, a fire-breathing dragon suspended from the ceiling seemed to be holding the giant chandelier in its claw. Dragons curled around the elaborately carved pillars and the walls were covered with Chinese paintings. In the Music Room, the soldiers lay under gilded lotus-shaped chandeliers.

To the Indians, it was a Chinese wonderland. One soldier thought he was in paradise and wrote home: "If on Earth there is a paradise, it is this, it is this, it is this", borrowing the famous words of the poet Amir Khusro which the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan had inscribed on the Diwan-e-Khas at the Red Fort.

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For King And Another Country; Rs 699; Bloomsbury.

A Sikh soldier from 59th Rifles wrote to his friend in India: "Our hospital is in the place where the king used to have his throne. Every man is washed once in hot water. The king has given a strict order that no trouble be given to any black man in hospital. Men in hospital are tended like flowers and the king and queen sometimes come to visit them."

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A letter written in January 1915 from a subedar major of the 6th Jats to a friend in India echoed the sentiment: "Everything is such as one would not see even in a dream. One should regard it as fairyland... There is no other place like this in the world… A motor car comes to take us out. The king and queen talked with us for a long time. I have never been so happy in my life as I am here." The censor board realised the publicity potential of such letters and took full advantage.

Nearly 1,20,000 postcards of the Indians in Brighton were sold locally during the war. Carefully constructed photographs were taken of Indian soldiers sitting in the grounds of the hospital playing cards, the domes of the Pavilion providing the exotic backdrop. Others showed them going for walks to the seaside.

Photographs of the soldiers lying below the grand chandeliers in the Music Room were sold as postcards to tourists as propaganda for the war. Later a souvenir was published in English, Gurmukhi and Urdu and nearly 20,000 copies shipped to India alone.

(Reprinted with the publisher’s permission.)

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Last updated: July 28, 2016 | 15:03
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