Events
School of English seminar series - sensing the First World War Indian Sepoy: objects, images and words
| Description | Santanu Das is a Reader at King's College London. He is the author of Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge, 2006) and the editor of Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge, 2011). He is currently editing the Cambridge Companion to First World War Poetry and completing a monograph on India, empire and First World War literature and art. |
| Presenter | Dr Santanu Das (Kings College, London) |
| Type | Seminar, Talk |
| Open to | All staff and students, All students, Alumni, Committee members, Parents/guardians, Postgraduates, Prospective students, Public, Staff, Undergraduates |
| Date | Thursday, 11 April 2013 |
| Time | 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM |
| Where | The Lawson Lecture Room, Kennedy Hall, School of English |
| Contact | Professor Gill Plain |
| gp3@st-andrews.ac.uk | |
| More info | Around 1.5 million Indians were involved in the First World War as colonial soldiers or labourers. In a grotesque reversal of Conrad’s vision, hundreds of thousands of Asians and Africans sailed to the heart of whiteness and beyond to take part in ‘the horror, the horror’ of industrial warfare between 1914 and 1918. And yet they have largely been written out of narratives of the First World War and modernity. The aims of this talk are both recuperative and literary. Drawing upon fresh archival, visual and literary material from England, Belgium, France, Germany and India – ranging from the soldiers’ censored letters and the original voice recordings of Indian POWs, photographs, paintings and memoirs to literary works by Rudyard Kipling, Ernst Junger and Mulk Raj Anand – I shall argue how a nuanced dialogue between objects, images and words is essential to uncover this shadowy world. Second, using India and the First World War as a historical node, I shall investigate the structures of feeling created by the conjunction of race, travel and colonial warfare, and the place of literary material and methodology in such a venture. |
