First World War

The story begins arrestingly, with the tale of a migrant, a well-connected man in his thirties, who finds himself on the losing side of a long-running war in an Asian country. His wife is killed in the fighting and he becomes a refugee, taking a boat out from the Turkish coast to Greece. His eventual destination is Rome, but after a harrowing journey, their boat is turned back from Sicily and lands in Tunisia. Eventually, after many adventures, the man does get to Rome. Migrants who undertook the crossing from…

In Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory (2017), Aanchal Malhotra traced family histories through objects people carried across the border during Partition. The book was well-researched and eminently readable. It established Malhotra (whose grandparents were refugees from what would become Pakistan) as an authority on the Partition. She came to be known as a memory keeper. Last year, In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition explored the legacy of the Partition,…

Although official historical narratives remember the Indian soldiers who ‘contributed’ to the First World War by fighting for the British empire, there were more than 550,000 Indian men, who participated in the same war as ‘non-combatants’ whom no one remembers. They were porters, stevedores, construction workers, janitors (sanitation workers who cleaned latrines), washermen, stretcher-bearers, water-carriers, cooks and many other menial job workers. It was through their backbreaking work that the British were able to…