India's Wartime Contribution to the Allied Cause
India sent over a million men overseas in the First World War and about 74,000 of them died. The Indian Army was a professional volunteer force of some 240,000 in 1914, recruited under a doctrine of martial races that drew disproportionately from Punjab, Nepal and the north-west, and it was the empire's strategic reserve. Two divisions of the Indian Corps landed at Marseille in September 1914 and were in the line in Flanders by October, in a European winter, in cotton uniforms, against artillery they had no equivalent training for. They held part of the line at Ypres and Neuve Chapelle at very heavy cost and were withdrawn to Mesopotamia at the end of 1915. Mesopotamia was the campaign that consumed them. The advance up the Tigris towards Baghdad was mounted with inadequate transport and medical services by a government in Delhi that had not planned for it, and ended with the siege of Kut, where some 13,000 men surrendered in April 1916 after five months and most of the Indian other ranks died on the march into captivity or in Ottoman labour camps. Indian troops also fought in East Africa, Egypt, Palestine, Gallipoli and Salonika. The political price was set out in the Montagu declaration of 1917 promising responsible government by stages, and paid in the Rowlatt Acts of 1919 extending wartime detention powers, and at Amritsar in April 1919. Twelve Victoria Crosses went to Indian soldiers. The memorial at Neuve-Chapelle carries the names of some 4,700 Indian soldiers with no known grave, and the India Gate in Delhi carries 13,000. The war is largely absent from Indian public memory, having been fought for an empire the country spent the following thirty years leaving.
- Year: 1914 CE
- Category: Military
