Airplanes thunder across at frequent intervals, but George Morton-Jack barely looks up. His parents live close to London's Heathrow, one of the world's busiest airports, he offers by way of an explanation. “You will stop noticing them in a bit,” he smiles.
A historian, Morton-Jack has written a voluminous account of Indian servicemen in the First World War. And in the season filled with books about the 'war that was to end all wars'—as the First World War was ironically called—The Indian Empire at War: From Jihad to Victory, The Untold Story of The Indian Army in the First World War hopes to fill in the blanks. “The First World War had a global impact, like the Second World War, but people don't see it like that,” says Morton-Jack.
The accounts of 1.5 million Indians who went to fight for King and Country, so far, have largely been pieced together through the letters, which were censored, they wrote home. There have also been official accounts. Morton-Jack, instead, goes for a different approach. He turned to those who witnessed Indians in the war, and talked to them. ''Someone saw them,” he says. “Someone spoke to them. I thought there must have been records of people who had conversations and wrote down things that they were told. That's what I found.”
Those accounts, scattered across the world, were what he used to chronicle the story of Indians who went to fight. But the treasure he stumbled upon was transcripts of interviews with war veterans, done in the 1970s. These were the testimonies of those who had survived the trenches and lived to tell their stories in their own words. “People knew that a group of Indian and American academics had gone to the Indian countryside to find veterans,'' he says. “But no one knew where the records had gone. After a few years, I saw, in an article, a footnote referring to somebody being quoted in one of those interviews. So, I thought he must know. I contacted him. He was elderly, and didn't have the time to work further on the interview transcripts. He was the only person in possession of the full transcript.”
This forms the bulk of his research. He also brings to life the stories of Sir Pratap, of the Jodhpur Lancers, who still kept up with the royals, sending them gifts and receiving things in return like “ginger”. From Pratap to Thakur Amar Singh, who probably has the longest diary in the world, to a host of others, Morton-Jack has tried to narrate the untold stories. Busting the myth that the Indian solider was unprepared to fight the war, Morton-Jack's research indicates that they were actually thorough professionals. On the battlefield, the Indians arrived in 'the nick of time', as Lord Curzon put it, and proved that “they were also skilled professionals who showed themselves ready to kill, dig trenches and suffer shell fire”.
Arsala Khan, of the Frontier Force's 57 Wilde's Rifles, and his Malik Din company—Afridis—were the first to head off to the front line. Little nuggets like these shine through Morton-Jack's otherwise overwhelming research.
