'Santanu Das shows how rich are the rewards for those who dig and delve, who look for meaning in tiny fragments of evidence … Drawing on a decade of such fieldwork, Das has made a forensic examination of hundreds of pieces of evidence - memoirs, letters, photographs, oral testimony, songs, pamphlets, poems, novels … this is his answer to the gap in our understanding … a lesson both in the close reading of sources and in how literary and historical studies can enrich each other.' Suzanne Bardgett, History Today
Introduction; Part I. The Restless Home Front; 1. The imperial-nationalist self: anti-discrimination, aspiration, and anxiety; 2. Sonorous fields: recruitment, resistance, and recitative in the Punjab; Part II. Race and Representation: 3. Five shades of brown: the sepoy-body in visual culture; 4. Imperial antibiotic: sepoy and the Raj; Part III. The Sepoy Heart: 5. Touching feeling: letters, poems, prayers, and songs of sepoys in Europe 1914–18; 6. 'Their lives have become ours': occupation, captivity, and lateral contact in Mesopotamia 1914–1918; 7. Transnational lives and peripheral visions; Part IV. Literary and Intellectual Cultures: 8. Literary imaginings; 9. The Indian English war novel: Across the Black Waters; 10. Post-war world and 'the future of mankind': Aurobindo, Iqbal, and Tagore.