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Post by confuzzled dude Sun May 01, 2016 9:01 pm

http://www.caravanmagazine.in/lede/madhavarams-military-men-0

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Post by confuzzled dude Sun May 01, 2016 9:10 pm

Like 1.5 million of his fellow countrymen in colonial India, Sukha volunteered enthusiastically when the call came for recruits to bear arms for Britain’s “King Emperor” in a far-off European war in 1914.

It was a journey from which the 30-year-old serviceman, again like tens of thousands of his compatriots, never returned. But when Sukha died, his remains were abandoned in a different “no man’s land” from the Flanders quagmire that claimed the lives of so many who fought on the Western Front in the First World War.

Sukha was a so-called “untouchable” – those regarded with such disdain that they did not merit a surname and performed menial functions, from cooking to emptying officers’ bed pans. When he died of pneumonia in 1915 in a Hampshire military hospital, neither his Hindu nor Muslim comrades were prepared to accept his body for burial. Instead, the vicar of St Nicholas Church in Brockenhurst offered a space in the graveyard for him.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/forgotten-role-of-indian-soldiers-who-served-in-first-world-war-marked-at-last-a6725851.html

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Post by confuzzled dude Sun May 08, 2016 3:42 pm

NEARLY 30 KILOMETERS SOUTHWEST OF BASRA, just off the open road to Nasiriyya, stands a sun-bleached stone monument to a forgotten era. In contrast to the grandeur of some of Iraq’s more modern monuments, the Basra War Memorial blends modestly and unobtrusively into the surrounding sandy desert. Its windswept and dilapidated stone edifice commemorates the 40,500 members of the British Empire’s operations in Mesopotamia whose final resting places are unknown. Among those names chiseled into immortality in the lengthy stone walkway framing a central pillar are the sons of India. An engraved sentence “as sad as any I’ve read in war” caught the eye of BBC reporter Fergal Keane while he accompanied coalition troops during the 2003 Iraq war: “It says simply: For Subhadar Mahanga and 1,770 other Indian soldiers.”

Such unassuming memorials as in that empty stretch of desert near Basra pay tribute to the extraordinary sacrifice of Indian soldiers, among others, who deployed to fight in the Great War. Yet despite these soldiers’ journeys across the seas and into the heartland of the Ottoman Empire, the Indian contribution to World War I in the Middle East is considerably less acknowledged outside the British Isles and the Indian subcontinent.

In truth, the links between the Middle East and South Asia go back centuries; the Great War served to bring the two populations even closer and in larger numbers than ever before. It was Indians, Egyptians, Australians, and other colonial subjects who manned the trenches and peopled the platoons that fought and won the war in the Middle East for the British.
IN THE GREAT WAR, SOUTH ASIANS WERE CRITICAL to Triple Entente victories around the Gulf, in Palestine, and throughout Greater Syria. This fact alone justifies paying increased attention to the Indians who fought in the Middle East, especially when compared to the enormous scholarship devoted to their European counterparts. Set aside their military contributions, however, and an additional rationale for studying these South Asians emerges.
http://wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/fall-2014-the-great-wars/forgotten-soldiers-india-in-great-war/

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