Whenever we have a long car journey ahead of us, my husband usually gets out his iPod (or whatever you call it) and connects it to the in-car power supply so that we can listen to his huge collection of podcasts en route. Our interests don't exactly coincide so we sometimes begin with an argument about which one to listen to.
On one recent occasion, I favoured "Bess of Hardwick" but Husband liked the sound of "Indians in World War I". Was he surprised when, on hearing the speaker's voice, I immediately said "That sounds like Santanu Das"! As the podcast continued, he was discomfited to find Santanu's talk, focusing on the experiences of Indians who fought in, or were affected by, the First World War, veering away from the subject of military history into the realms of social history and even, dare I say it, literature.
Santanu Das is, of course, an old friend of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship. His book, India, Empire and First World War Culture, was published in 2018, and you can actually still hear the podcast we listened to by going to https://www.historyextra.com/period/first-world-war/indians-in-world-war-one/ (you have to get past a short advert first). If you do, you will understand why I found it so fascinating and what makes Santanu such a valued member of the war poetry community of scholars.
The experiences of the Indian sepoys are in many ways typical of First World War infantrymen as a whole, but there are important differences. Without going into too much detail, one important difference is the way they were looked on by their white commanding officers and comrades, often with a kind of condescending affection, much like the feelings recorded by junior officers like Sassoon about the working-class soldiers under their command. It is easy for the mind of an educated 21st century reader to be disapproving of some of their comments and attitudes, but to forgive Sassoon and his generation, we have to understand something of the world they lived in.
Jared Diamond is an American historian and anthropologist you may not have heard of. His contribution to the set of podcasts describes his approach to analysing historical events through psychology, but his best-known work is 1997's Guns, Germs and Steel, a trans-disciplinary work which won a Pulitzer Prize. In it, Diamond explained why certain civilisations have dominated and survived where others have failed. Diamond's analyses of the influences that cause societies around the world to react differently to crises are well worth examining.
Also interesting, and in some ways a natural progression from Santanu Das and Jared Diamond, was a podcast recorded some time ago by former politician and soldier, the late Paddy Ashdown, who had at the time just published his last book, Nein!: Standing Up to Hitler 1935-1944, which dealt with the numerous failed attempts to unseat the Fascist dictator before he could destroy the future of Europe.
Lord Ashdown's credentials as a warrior were second to none; perhaps it was because of this that he understood the political landscape, both international and domestic, better than most. Having been born in British India and spent part of his childhood in Northern Ireland, he recognised the colonial mindset and its inevitable consequences. Nevertheless, it came as a bit of a surprise to hear him say that, had he grown up as a Roman Catholic in the province during the 1950s and 1960s, he might well have become a member of the IRA; he understood the circumstances that led to the Troubles.
Siegfried was acquainted with an earlier Ireland, one that was beset by its own troubles and heading towards the long-denied independence, but he did not become a rebel until 1917. It was not in his nature to defy authority unless he was moved to do so by personal experience, and the losses of so many friends, combined with what we would now call PTSD, pushed him into his protest. Who can say whether, under other circumstances, he might ever have considered more drastic action?
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