TY - JOUR
AU - Nair,, Aparna
AB - Abstract The sepoy had always been a central figure in colonial governance and policing and had played important roles in both world wars. Focusing on World War I, this article explores the sepoys’ corporeal experience of the war through their own letters. The article explores how the war had a catalytic impact on colonial perceptions of and responses to disability in the colony and how medicine, prosthetics and rehabilitation came to be seen as the ‘promise’ made by the Crown to Indian soldiers for their service. The article also examines the introduction of cultures and institutions of rehabilitation into the colony in the form of the Queen Mary Technical Institute and explores the intersections of race, empire and disability at these sites of rehabilitation. disability, race, medicine, rehabilitation, WWI Even in far-off India, the trade of automobile mechanics takes hold of the imaginations of the natives. It must be a curious sight indeed to see India’s disabled sons operating an automobile or studying the intricacies of mechanics in the shops that are operated at Queen Mary’s Technical school in Bombay. These curly-bearded, olive-skinned warriors will not be left on the highways to beg, after they have served their country, but will be trained for useful trades in which their physical handicaps do not prevent them from competing with able-bodied men.1 As millions of demobilised and disabled soldiers flooded back to their homes from the multi-fronted First World War, the figure of the disabled veteran captured the public imagination. Newspaper reports across the world described the range of facilities, charities and institutions that emerged in order to heal and rehabilitate the disabled soldier and return them to ‘normalcy’ and economic productivity. In these public accounts of the disabled veteran, the Indian sepoy was often presented as both counterfoil and complement to the more familiar English, American, Australian and Canadian soldiers.2 One such newspaper report lauded the benevolence of the colonial state in not abandoning its Indian veterans to fend for themselves and connected the project of rehabilitating disabled sepoys to industrial economies and modern technologies. Indeed, for the anonymous author, disability incurred in the service of the British Empire was constructed as a catalyst that permitted Indian veterans to transcend what were perceived as the limits of Indian society, avoid the (inevitable) perils of mendicancy and facilitated the sepoy veteran’s transition to industrial, ‘modern’ subjectivities. The sepoy’s role in the First World War was indeed substantial, as were other Indian inputs towards the war effort of money and materials. In a 1917 speech to the British parliament, Lord Hardinge, previously Viceroy of India, described these contributions as a heavy drain on the colony which he said, had been ‘bled absolutely white during the first weeks of the war’.3 Over one million Indians, including over 621,224 combatants and 474,789 non-combatants, travelled overseas between August 1914 and December 1919, serving in places as diverse as France, Belgium, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Gallipoli, Palestine, Sinai and East and West Africa.4 Despite their numbers, it is noticeable that, as Das pointed out, sepoy veterans were initially marginalised in South Asian ‘nationalist-elitist’ historiography and within the metropolitan memories of the Great War.5 Recent work by scholars from a range of fields has rehabilitated not only just the Indian sepoy but also the Tasmanian Aboriginal soldier, Te Hokowhitu A Tu, Algerian and Tunisian soldiers, Jamaican volunteers and Ottoman soldiers within the broader historiography on the Great War.6 The focus on the sepoy has been particularly rewarding: David Omissi’s work has restored the voices of Indian soldiers struggling with the First World War, while Andrew Jarboe, Mark Harrison and Ana Carden-Coyne traced in detail how injured Indian soldiers were perceived and treated while in Europe and how medicine became a part of the promise made to Indian soldiers for their service.7 Much of this work still maintains its focus on Indian sepoys on the Western Front, the UK, Africa and the Middle East and less is known of the corporeal experiences and economic trajectories of these soldiers once they returned to their homes.8 A similar lacuna is perceptible in disability histories of the Great War, too, which have also largely emphasised the experiences of European, North American, Australian and New Zealand soldiers.9 This article situates the sepoy within the discourses on the body and medicine in the First World War and examines medical, institutional and rehabilitative responses to the wounded and disabled Indian soldier in the colony. The article begins by using medical reports, censuses and censors’ reports to examine sepoys’ perceptions and corporeal experiences of war and disability.10 This article traces the valorisation of the figure of the wounded/disabled sepoy in the public imagination in both the metropole and the colony, while also provoking anxieties about policies and provisions for the disabled sepoy in the colony. The most tangible responses of the colonial state to the disabled sepoy were the state-supported production of prosthetics and the emergence of rehabilitative cultures and infrastructures. The article argues that the war precipitated some transformations in medical technologies and provisions for Indians, specifically the increased emphasis on the use of X-ray technologies, ambulances and orthopaedic medicine. Most notably, the war saw the establishment of residential institutions for the rehabilitation of disabled Indian veterans that were the first of their kind in the colony. Despite the transplantation of cultures of rehabilitation to India, this article argues that the exigencies of wartime also revealed the often threadbare, reactive character of colonial medicine and the non-existent technological infrastructure for people with physical impairments prior to the war. In addition, the trajectories and outcomes of rehabilitation were influenced by race, space and imperial anxieties. The Sepoy at War Only those men who have been rendered unfit by wounds or sickness will see the Punjab, not the others. But what can one do? It is Pramatha (God’s) favour that is on the world, everything is at his mercy … Parameshwar (God) knows what will happen.11 By the beginning of the 20th century, sepoys had been fighting and dying in the volunteer armies of the English East India Company and for the British Crown for more than two centuries.12 Sepoys had fought French soldiers in Egypt and had ensured British victory over their mutinying sepoy compatriots during the Rebellion of 1857, in addition to being a significant part of imperial policing and military actions in many colonies.13 When the First World War began, Indian soldiers and non-combatants naturally became a significant part of British imperial efforts in a conflict that surpassed all that had come before in terms of the nature, scale and the intensity of casualties in battle. Between October 1914 and December 1915 alone, 138,608 Indians served in France and fought at the battles of Ypres, Festubert, Givency, Neuve Chapelle, Second Ypres and Loos.14 Sepoys were even more significant in the Mesopotamian theatre, where 588,717 combatants and non-combatants served.15 Compared to the greater visibility of British soldiers in the records of the war, data on the precise nature and extent of wounds and injuries sustained by Indian soldiers and other participants in the war are relatively elusive.16 However, existing medical and census statistics do bear out the toll of war on sepoys’ bodies. The total number of deaths in the Indian army from August 1914 to 31 December 1920 amounted to 62,056 soldiers of all ranks; while 66,889 soldiers of all ranks in the Indian army were wounded.17 Among the sepoys that landed at Marseilles alone in late September and early October of 1914, the rate of wounding and physical trauma in just 3 months of fighting was close to 25 per cent.18 Imperial census reports for British India allow us to assess rates of invaliding in the Indian army. In the decades before the First World War, invaliding rates fluctuated between 6 and 8 per thousand but from 1915 onwards, this escalated rapidly to a rate of around 25–28 per thousand.19 Similarly, the ratio of hospital admissions for this population had also increased from pre-war levels of 530–540 per thousand to as high as 856 per thousand by 1918. The ratio of ‘constantly sick’ soldiers in the census returns also escalated dramatically during the war from around 21 per thousand before the start of the war to 41 per thousand by 1918.20 In fact, the physical costs of this war were so high that even the Viceroy was compelled to argue that India was ‘being exploited by the War Office because they find that they can maintain Indian troops abroad without those extremely objectionable questions in Parliament which would be asked if they were British and not Indian forces’.21 Several months later, the Government of India would again caution the British government against using Indian troops as grist for the mill of the war.22 The First World War was certainly an unprecedented corporeal experience for the sepoys despite their military experiences across the Empire. This war was distinctive for the widespread use of machine guns, high explosives, aerial bombardment, tanks and gas as well as the bitter and bloody deadlocks accompanying trench warfare and was, therefore, certainly outside sepoys’ usual experiences of conflict. The specific conditions of trench warfare on the western front had left soldiers vulnerable to potentially disabling shrapnel and gunshot wounds, while collapsing trenches and falls were equally dangerous with soldiers presenting in hospitals with crushed backs and legs as their bodies were crushed under falling sandbags used to shore up trenches.23 As Biernoff pointed out, the conditions of the war contributed to a high prevalence of facial wounds and subsequent disabilities.24 Simply handling poison gas, let alone direct exposure to gassing, would have resulted in a range of symptoms, including terrible burns, blindness or in the worst-case scenario, a slow and painful death as the lungs were burned out.25 In addition, a slew of infectious diseases held their sway over soldiers in the trenches, including typhus, enteric fever and tuberculosis.26 Soldiers from the Indian army were inexperienced with the harshness of winter in the trenches of Europe—frostbite, bronchitis, rheumatism and pneumonia were all likely consequences of being continually immersed in cold, muddy water.27 On the other hand, the soldier fighting in the Middle East and in Africa was exposed to a different set of corporeal challenges: here, soldiers were likely to experience the debilitating effects of heat and sunstroke.28 Aside from the immediate morbidity and mortality from chronic dysentery and cholera, malaria and tuberculosis were also likely to contribute to long-term chronic weakness and recurring illness on this front.29 Furthermore, Indian troops were also vulnerable to nutritional deficits in long-term campaigns owing to the uncertainties of their field diet. For instance, the Mesopotamia Commission found that 11,000 Indian troops had died of scurvy.30 Aside from these physical injuries and diseases, the psychological trauma that often accompanied service in the frontlines also had the potential to contribute to long-term impairment among sepoys.31 Perhaps equally as revealing as medical and military records about the disabling nature of the war were sepoys’ letters from the front.32 Alternately, poetic, plaintive, stoic and fearful, the majority of letters conveyed family anxieties, prayers, requests for money, troop movements and the more mundane events of everyday life. Soldiers drew on familiar religious metaphors to describe the war: while Muslim sepoys invoked the ‘Karbala’ to refer to the violence they experienced, Hindus consistently referred to the epic battles of the Mahabharata. As one soldier wrote: ‘Do not think that this is war. This is not war. It is the ending of the world. This is just such a war as was related in the Mahabharata about our forefathers.’33 While the letters vary dramatically in affect—some appeared to have come to terms with their situation and sought to reassure their families back in India, many more captured the toll of war on the human body. Trench warfare was described in vivid and graphic terms: as an endless stream of sleepless nights, a deluge of bullets and shells, ‘which fell thicker than drops of rain’ and a ‘river of blood’.34 The bitter cold and snow was another recurrent theme in soldiers’ letters: ‘In the trench, the snow rises from the feet to the neck and the feet and hands are frost-bitten’.35 A recurring theme in these letters was the fear and helplessness soldiers felt as they confronted the relentless shelling and chemical warfare for the first time. For instance, Ramnath Singh wrote that the Germans had ‘… a machine gun which scatters bullets like water … (and) a shell full of poison from the vapour of which one dies’.36 Letters also capture the soldier’s awareness of the disabling potential of this war: as one wounded sepoy wrote to his brother in India: ‘Four thousand (Indians) had lost arms or legs and many have lost their sight’.37 Many letters also interpreted disability through the framework of karma: ‘… all this is the return God gives for what we have done in a former birth’.38 Sepoys were also clearly aware that wounds alone did not suffice to be invalided back to India. The nature of the disability had to be irreversible and significant—usually the loss of an arm or leg or blindness’.39 As one soldier put it: ‘[Only] the man who has lost a leg or an arm returns to India. My ankle is broken. I was hit twice. My life is safe, but my leg is useless’.40 Yet, the letters also conveyed a curious tension in sepoy attitudes towards disability: while on one hand, they feared disability and its consequences, some sepoys simultaneously implicitly acknowledged that disability was the price they had to pay in order to return to their homes. Both this fear and ambiguity are evident in this account: ‘I have been wounded twice, and now this is the third time I am being sent to the trenches. The English say it is all right. How can it be all right! As long as one is unhurt, so long they will not let one off. If Parmeshwar allows, I will escape, but the butcher does not let the goat escape’.41 Another wrote wistfully: ‘I am not one of those who are to return to India. Only those go to India who have but one arm or one leg. This is the fact, Germany has made us a fine lot of specimens. It makes one cry, and even laugh, to see them’.42 These letters also convey how some sepoys experienced and perceived their own disabilities and the emotional aftermath of their injuries. Subedar Jodh Singh, for instance, wrote about being struck by a shell in his left shoulder, resulting in a ‘great wound, but now it is healed. However, alas, it is useless’.43 Lying in the New Milton Convalescent Home, Raghunath Prasad wrote despairingly: ‘My legs are absolutely useless. I am always praying to God and saying, “Oh God, it would have been much better, if I had died, for what can I do in India in such a crippled condition?” What a contrast there is not between the state of hope in which I came to Europe and what I am now! All my relations advised me not to go, but I volunteered’.44 Much like Prasad, Lance Naik Phina Ram penned a letter about his impairment from his English hospital bed just as he was about to be shipped home. ‘I am absolutely crippled in the leg’, he wrote, ‘and wherever I go I shall be avoided’. His anxieties about his disability permeate the missive; he worried that he would not just be avoided but be cast out when he returned: ‘they (his family) will even turn me out at home … I do not know whether to tell the people at home what has happened to me or not. I am very anxious. If they do not welcome me at home, I am thinking of going on a pilgrimage and living by myself on what government may give me’.45 The Sepoy in Hospital As soldiers began returning to India from the war, representations of the wounded sepoy in contemporary print media acknowledged their loyalty and service to Empire. Not only were they brave, but they also were presented as ‘glad … to them belongs the glory of having done their “bit” in fighting the common enemy’.46 Viceroy Lord Hardinge was eager to ensure a positive narrative among returning Indian soldiers: this was seen as important for British ‘prestige’ in India and the ‘attachment the lower classes have to the Sirkar’.47 Medicine became a part of the assurance made by the Sirkar to the Indian soldier, a message that the Crown had not forgotten their service and also had significant narrative potential for the British and colonial administrations. For Indians wounded in European line units, the role of medicine has been well documented. Once wounded, they were usually evacuated by ambulance wagons, trains and hospital shops to base hospitals restricted to Indian soldiers situated in Southampton, Brighton and at the Lady Hardinge Memorial Hospital at Brockenhurst.48 Between 1914 and 1915 alone, 14,514 wounded Indian soldiers were moved to Indian hospitals in the UK run by the doctors and surgeons of the Indian Medical Service.49 By 1915, a thousand soldiers of the Indian army had passed through the doors of the Kitchener Hospital in Brighton alone.50 In British and Indian hospitals treating wounded sepoys, the ‘objects aimed at the treatment of gunshot wounds would have been, in order of importance: first, to save the patient’s life; second, to save the patient’s limbs; and third, to save the patient’s limbs with function unimpaired, so as to render him fit for service’.51 Nearly half of all gunshot wounds in the hospital from February to November 1915 did in fact return to duty; while only 28 per cent of the soldiers were invalided out of the service compared to the 23 per cent remained in the hospital and were transferred on demobilisation.52 But, by 1917, the bulk of the Indian army was engaged in the Middle East and Africa. Soldiers wounded on these fronts were transferred first to hospital ships in the Persian Gulf to be treated and then returned to the frontlines. If seriously wounded, they were transported by steamer from Basra across the Arabian Sea to Bombay and Karachi.53 Once disembarked, British soldiers were segregated from the Indian soldiers and the British wounded soldiers were taken to the Military Hospital at Colaba.54 After being discharged from the hospital, British soldiers were sent to convalescent depots or homes in Bombay, Nasik and Dharwar.55 The ‘sick and wounded’ Indian soldiers were initially housed in the Lady Hardinge war hospital, which was supported in part by the Indian Soldiers’ Fund and the Imperial Indian Relief Fund.56 As the flood of returning wounded soldiers increased, the Lady Hardinge Hospital was soon unable to manage the influx. In response, civil hospitals in the region and charitable hospitals (such as the Sassoon Hospital, the Free Mission Hospital and the Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy Hospital) were also opened up to admitting sick and wounded Indian troops.57 Existing buildings were requisitioned by military authorities and retrofitted into military hospitals. In Bombay, for instance, the Bomanji Dinshaw Petit Parsee General Hospital in Cumballa, in southern Bombay became the Cumballa War Hospital in 1917.58 The war also underscored the need for better emergency medical transport systems in the colony, a need that was met by the St. John Ambulance Association and the Red Cross, supported by philanthropy and with state support. Indeed, across the world, the First World War had a dynamic influence on both the St. John Ambulance order and the Red Cross, and India was no different.59 At the end of the 19th century, the need for first-aid training and ambulance work in India had been raised to the St John Hospitallers. The latter had already been active in caring for the indigent, poor, infirm and disabled in Cairo, Jerusalem and other colonies and by 1910 had a limited foothold in South Asia.60 Before the war, the St. John Ambulance Brigade mostly provided training in first aid, home nursing and home hygiene in Bombay and in Ceylon and was largely supported by contributions from local elites.61 But when the war started, the St. John Ambulance set up war hospitals, ran ambulances and trained personnel. Similarly, the Red Cross society ran 14 motor ambulances that served the front and war hospitals in India in addition to a ‘small fleet of motor ambulance boats’ that plied wounded soldiers back to South Asia across the Persian Gulf.62 The Indian Red Cross also provided trained personnel to serve on land and sea ambulances.63 Both the St. John Ambulance and the Red Cross became the recipients of donations in cash and kind made by private citizens, Indian elites and voluntary organisations.64 For instance, before 1914, the Red Cross had a limited presence in India with pre-war assets only amounting to a few hundred rupees, but the war resulted in a flood of very public charitable donations and the mobilisation of trained personnel in a number of roles.65 For Indian princely states in particular, these contributions were intended as tangible evidence of their fealty to the Empire. The war also gave a fillip to the emergence of orthopaedic medicine in British India, in the shape of the short-lived Orthopaedic Institute established in the hill-station of Dehra Dun in October 1917.66 Intended solely for maimed Indian soldiers returning from the overseas forces, this institute was funded by the state under war expenditure.67 The bare-boned institution was staffed by a single military sub-assistant surgeon, and soldiers arriving at the Institute received specialised orthopaedic treatment to facilitate their recoveries from war injuries and retrieve the maximum possible use of their limbs.68 Rehabilitation efforts at the Orthopaedic Institute included electrical and massage treatments.69 The Dehradun Institute was seen as a short-term measure to the exigencies of the war and closed almost as soon as the war itself ended in early 1919. However, more permanent orthopaedic hospitals for ‘purely military patients’ were eventually established at Cawnpore, two at Ambala, three in Karachi, four in Dehradun—including the Lady Chelmsford Special Red Cross X-Ray and Electro-Therapeutic Hospital established by the St. John Ambulance Association.70 Equipped on ‘modern lines’, these institutions were intended as therapeutic spaces for disabled soldiers to recover from their injuries—a transition between the hospital and the rehabilitative institution.71 The Lady Chelmsford institution was restricted to patients requiring electrical and X-ray treatment for the ‘localisation of deep-seated foreign bodies’, presumably shrapnel.72 Electropathy, hydropathy, gymnastics, remedial exercises and massage treatments were offered both at the Orthopaedic Hospital in Dehradun and in Mussorie.73 Reporting on medical provisions for wounded and disabled Indian soldiers in newspapers was often laudatory, framing these provisions as responses befitting the sepoys’ contributions in the war effort. However, despite the rosy picture of medical provisions in contemporary newspapers, contemporaneous assessments such as the Mesopotamia Commission instead condemned medical responses to wounded soldiers in India, which revealed a military medical infrastructure groaning under the pressures of the war.74 Focusing only on provisions for the British sick and wounded arriving in India, the Mesopotamia Commission commented that the outbreak of war, the ‘whole standard of medical establishments, of hospital equipment, and of field ambulances in India has been for years past much below that in vogue (sic) in the British army’.75 The war revealed the racial and structural fault lines within the colonial medical establishment in India. Colonial medicine had a significantly urban, metropolitan bias since it had developed in response to the specific priorities and needs of colonial enclaves, armies and commerce and, therefore, was ill-equipped to deal with the needs of wounded Indian soldiers returning in large numbers.76 The director of the Military Medical Services in India also commented that there had only been two or three ‘up-to-date’ hospitals for British soldiers.77 Indeed, in the wake of the war, conditions in provincial hospitals in particular were estimated to be so poor that the Government of India proposed using the revenues of the Joint War committee’s invested funds to further and expand the ‘usefulness of provincial hospitals’.78 Such a scheme was advocated as necessary because disabled soldiers often sought care at provincial hospitals and, therefore, could ‘result in material advantage to disabled soldiers both before and after leaving the service’.79 The Mesopotamia Commission also condemned the ‘campaign of (medical) economy’ as it was practised in India.80 In 1915, for instance, the Commission reported evidence that the Colaba station hospital was poorly equipped, lacking ‘electric fans and light’, adequate X-ray apparatus, ‘lack of sufficient air-beds, water-beds, ring pillows … lack of splints and other surgical apparatus’.81 Given the racial and spatial patterns of colonial medical infrastructures, it is fair to assume that conditions in the Indian hospitals were far worse than those for the British soldiers. Hospitals for Indian soldiers were further hampered by resource constraints in addition to which sepoys were expected to provide their own bedding, clothing and food.82 The results of the Commission allied to press condemnations and pressure from the India Office did result in concrete improvements in war hospitals across India, as Sehrawat demonstrated.83 The results included both small-scale changes such as ice boxes, fans and electricity in Indian war hospitals to accommodations and war hospitals for Indian sepoys.84 The Sepoy and His Artificial Limb Naim had … got himself fixed up in a military-run factory with clips that securely attached his wooden arm to his stump. In the village, they marvelled at the artificial limb and asked questions about the factory where it was made and the kind of machinery they had. They shook their heads in wonderment when Naim told them the truth. As well as fitting the clips, they treated the wood with chemicals and applied a special paint of a colour that almost exactly matched Naim’s natural skin. Under a full sleeve shirt, it would take a close look, or prior knowledge, to tell one hand from the other. Naim could not help his father with work on the land as much he used to do in the past, although he did whatever he could—he could work a plough, but only for so long, and he trained himself to ride as well as he ever did before. The only thing he was unable to do was cut green fodder with a scythe, which required the grip of both hands and, however natural-looking his left hand was, he could not make a fist of it.85 In Abdullah Hussein’s heartfelt exploration of a land and people rent apart by Partition, ‘Udas Naslain’, the protagonist Naim is indelibly marked by the Great War after he loses an arm and is invalided out of the army. Fictional although it is, Hussein’s story captured in vivid detail how Indians responded to artificial limbs in the wake of the war. Indeed, prosthetics were one of the enduring global legacies of the First World War and certainly one of the most important steps towards rehabilitating disabled soldiers. When the first shipments of sepoys returned to India in 1915, questions were raised about provisions for the wounded and disabled in the colony. Indian soldiers who had become disabled in ‘foreign climes’ (and their families) were not to be abandoned, one letter in the Leader argued, and ‘Indian representatives must see that the cause of Indian soldiers is not neglected’.86 In the November 1915 edition of the Desh, an author asked what measures were to be instituted for maintaining Indian soldiers who had been completely disabled in the war.87 After the Armistice in 1919, the British Viceroy declared ‘We owe victory to those who have been crippled and maimed and blinded in the war. We must see that they do not want’.88 The question of making provisions for the thousands of soldiers who ‘lost their lives or limbs in the war … in the service of the Empire’ was also highlighted in state discourse more than it had ever been. The issue was raised before Parliament, and unfavourable comparisons were drawn between the colonial administration’s response to Indian soldiers and the nationalised and multivalent approach towards disabled British soldiers.89 Prosthetics were a part of the promise made to disabled Indian soldiers, like medicine was to the wounded soldier. As early as 1915, when Austen Chamberlain, then Secretary of State for India, assured certain ‘arrangements for their return to their homes’.90 He had pledged an artificial limb centre in India to wounded sepoys in Brighton and promised them ‘comfortable trains which would take them up country’.91 In a 1916 report by Colonel Walter Lawrence of the War Office to the Secretary of State for War that was also published in Indian newspapers, the question of artificial limbs for maimed Indian soldiers had been raised as a necessary response to the war.92 In the 19th century, the European and North American metropole had witnessed a positive efflorescence of innovation in the materials, design and functionality of prosthetics.93 Artificial limbs were produced using light and flexible woods, leather, German silver and iron and increasingly drew on the technological and material transformations brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Designers and producers of prosthetics were fashioning lighter and more flexible prosthetics—by introducing springs into the design, to take one example. Despite the technological innovations that transformed the prosthetic limb industry in the metropole, British India did not have comparable access to these technologies. Before the First World War, the archives offer little evidence of state investment or interest in systematically providing prosthetics for sepoys or civilian employees that had been disabled in service. The Indian Medical Gazette, for instance, did occasionally mention artificial limbs, but usually as an infrequent footnote to accounts of successful amputations.94 It was not routine practice for colonial hospitals and dispensaries to dispense artificial limbs to patients, and medical accounts suggest that physicians or private philanthropists often had to buy or make their own prosthetics using available resources. Even at the close of the Second Afghan War, British soldiers who were injured enough to require amputations were routinely sent to Netley to be fitted with artificial limbs after their surgeries.95 Indian soldiers, however, did not usually have easy access to prosthetics from the metropole. For the duration of the 19th century, the average sepoy who had lost a limb to injury or infection would very likely have made their own artificial limb been fitted in a local bazaar or would have gone to the village carpenter.96 Unlike the India rubber and flexible woods utilised by the artificial limb industry in the metropole, these functional prostheses were more likely to have been manufactured from whatever woods were available in each region and were most suitable to the purposes. For instance, in areas where bamboo was prolific, it was used to make a rudimentary prosthesis.97 These prosthetics were likely to have been simple, inexpensive and functional if not entirely comfortable, light or flexible. Petitions in the archives suggest that even remunerations for artificial limbs were only approved in the rarest of instances and usually for British soldiers and employees. This unequal access to prosthetics in the 19th century is probably most clearly demonstrated in this incident, reported in the Pioneer newspaper in 1886. Sardha Singh, a pensioned duffadar of the 9th Bengal Lancers had ‘lost his own (emphasis in original)’ wooden leg while serving with the Hodson’s Horse brigade during the Mutiny.98 The author astringently pointed to the unfathomable actions of a ‘paternal Government’ failing to provide Singh with a new wooden leg nearly three decades after the petitioner had lost his own in the service of the state. Clearly, even for sepoys whose missing limbs stood as tangible material evidence of their loyalty to the British during the Mutiny, the colonial state was very unlikely to pay for prosthetic limbs. The First World War, however, represents a significant milestone in the history of the technologies and production of prosthetics in India. When increasing numbers of the Indian contingent wounded in France and treated in British hospitals required prostheses, they were initially provided with them at both Brighton and Roehampton.99 Writing in Urdu from the Kitchener’s Indian Hospital in Brighton, Rajwali Khan responded to his newly fitted artificial limb: Alas! Alas! … . There is nothing but my corpse left. They have cut off the whole of one leg, and one hand too is useless. What is the use of my going to India thus? … . They have given me a leg, but it is made of wood, and vile. I cannot walk. I shall start for India in a few days … . There is nothing left of me. I have lost a hand and a leg. What am I to do?100 For those sepoys wounded in Mesopotamia or sent directly to Bombay, prostheses were provided initially through war hospitals like the Marine Lines War Hospital in Bombay and were the financial responsibility of military authorities.101 Initially, these prosthetics were supplied from England, but several cases of artificial limbs made in the UK were also shipped from France to India.102 Imported prostheses were not viable as a longer-term solution: not only were they expensive, but these prostheses were also believed to require additional adjustments and repairs that would enable them to endure the heat and challenges of the Indian climate and environment.103 In response to the growing demand and cost, an institution for the indigenous manufacture of artificial limbs was established at Deolali in July 1916, where the army sent soldiers with serious orthopaedic injuries.104 Simultaneously, the centre was to ensure that not only the artificial limbs were to be built of materials and with technologies that simultaneously reflected the advances in the metropole but also were designed such they were ‘serviceable and suitable to Indian conditions and to the wear and tear of the Indian village’.105 Interestingly, Lawrence reported that Indians preferred artificial limbs imported from Europe, as they suspected the quality of locally produced prosthetics. He cited the example of one Indian officer who had been sent to Roehampton to be fitted for an artificial leg, of which he was ‘very proud’.106 Despite these innovations, the cost of prosthetics proved to be a significant hindrance towards the rapid dissemination of the emergent technologies. By 1918, the annual Government of India expenditure for artificial limbs amounted to around 6,000 pounds.107 In this same year, there were discussions of importing expertise from the USA to India—a ‘special man from America’—to supervise the indigenous manufacture of artificial limbs, suggesting that the nascent indigenous industry was struggling to meet the demand.108 However, the plan was shelved because it would increase the cost by the sum of a thousand pounds per annum.109 This surging wartime demand for artificial limbs in South Asia also elevated the profile of private companies that designed and sold artificial limbs in India. Newspaper advertisements suggest that at least two companies that sold surgical appliances, including artificial limbs in Bombay presidency: the Bombay Surgical Company and N. Powell’s.110 Established in 1891, Powell’s manufactured and sold artificial limbs and exhibited their products in the Paris Exposition Universalle in 1900, where it received the Gran Prix. Powell’s appears to have cornered the market and had contracts with government hospitals, the Red Crescent Indian Medical Mission and with the colonial army.111 During World War One, this company was also provided the contracts for fitting out the war and base hospitals and hospital ships. The company also advertised in English-language colonial newspapers, and these typically presented what appeared to be a white male fitted with a prosthetic leg. He was represented seated with his artificial limb removed and propped by his chair or depicted at work in his shirtsleeves in what appears to be a factory setting. At the same time, the war also had an impact on indigenous innovation. For instance, in 1917, Mr. Nathumal of R. N. Oswal and company in Bombay invented a ‘combined peg leg and walking stick’, which was pitched specifically as being very useful to those ‘who have unfortunately lost their legs partly or cut off on account of disease or on account of wound on the battlefield’.112 The Sepoy and Rehabilitation In the metropole, disabled veterans of this war had propelled a rupture in the social perceptions of disability more generally and resulted in the ‘birth’ of new ways of addressing disability.113 As the war generated a flood of young, previously able-bodied and recently disabled citizens, states and societies commenced efforts to rehabilitate these newly disabled citizen-subjects and reintegrate them into the labour force.114 As early as 1915, disabled British troops had recourse to programmes built on the realisation that soldiers needed training and education that taught them how to adapt to their prostheses. Roehampton was the flagship of Britain’s network of orthopaedic facilities and one among the 16 establishments set up by British military authorities for the ‘after-careers’ of soldiers while they were still undergoing hospital treatment.115 Roehampton itself was perceived as a ‘model for nation and empire’ in the matter of the commercial and industrial training for limbless men—administrators and other observers from across Britain and the empire visited Roehampton and took the model to their countries.116 Indeed, the British themselves recognised that their colonial counterparts in India had fallen behind in efforts to create an infrastructure for rehabilitation beyond the hospital. Reports sent back to Britain at the end of the First World War from the Government of India conceded that there had been ‘considerable delay’ in establishing institutions to treat and rehabilitate the flood of disabled sepoys arriving on the western shores of the subcontinent, compared to the pace of comparable provisions in the metropole.117 This was remedied only in May of 1917 when the Willingdon Institute for Disabled Soldiers opened in Bombay primarily through the interest of Lady Willingdon, the wife of the British Governor-General.118 Modelled explicitly on Roehampton, the institute was perceived as an extension of the biomedical provisions for soldiers returning from the front and as a necessary initiative for soldiers newly fitted with prosthetic limbs.119 Disabled veterans with artificial limbs were especially unlikely to be able to return easily to agricultural labour, and the school was envisioned as a space to teach residents a trade to be able to earn a livelihood. This occupational rehabilitation ensured that disabled veterans were no longer ‘an encumbrance to their family by reason of the loss of their limbs’, but equally, this livelihood was intended to create economically independent individuals whose burden on the colonial state’s pension establishment was diminished.120 Although established for veterans of the war, the school endured the end of the war as the Indian army continued to discharge 400 disabled men annually.121 The school subsequently broadened their criterion for entry and aimed to attract any soldier or follower pensioned as unfit for further service from any cause whatever.122 A committee initially headed by Lady Willingdon and comprised of other British and Indian members, including Parsi businessmen and philanthropists, administered the institute.123 The school was financed through public and private contributions. Indeed, as the disabled sepoy became something of a cause-celebre in the colony, the institute itself became a popular space for local charitable organisations and elites (particularly the princely states) to make public displays of their fealty to the Crown and support for the war effort.124 Partial funding for the school came from the interest accruing from the interest of a ten lakh endowment from the Government of India, while the buildings and the ground used by the school were the property of the Trust.125 Support from the government also came in the form of rations and railway warrants for the students at the school.126 In 1920, the school received additional support from the Indian Soldiers’ Fund in London, which amounted to 9,000 pounds and in 2 years moved from Bombay to a permanent campus in Kirkee.127 In the first few months of its operation, possible students were drawn from the beds of the Marine Lines Hospital in Bombay.128 In later years, admission to the school was restricted to men drawing injury pensions of the ‘first and second degrees’—which involved the loss of at least one limb, with significant subsequent impairment in terms of ability to earn a livelihood and degree of dependence.129 Before being admitted to these institutions, soldiers were to be examined by a medical board that would determine the eligibility for both transfer and training.130 The first soldiers at the Queen Mary Technical Institute (QMTI) included ‘Gurkhas, Pathans, Sikhs, Marathas, Punjabis and Madrasis’, some of whom had lost both their legs ‘but are able to walk freely with artificial limbs’.131 While undergoing treatment and instruction, soldiers were provided full pay commensurate with their rank and service for the first 6 months of their stay at the institute.132 The schools also provided a family allowance of six rupees a month, which while not excessive, was certainly better than nothing.133 By 1922–23, the QMTI was spending roughly 12,800 rupees on salaries for sepoys receiving rehabilitation, much of which was funded by the War Office.134 The British government was only willing to fund those soldiers who had been invalided in the Great War. In the years after the end of the First World War, sepoys who had been invalided and disabled in battles along the turbulent North West Frontier provinces were also receiving treatment at the QMTI, but the British government refused to pay for their rehabilitation and instead insisted that the Government of India finance these soldiers’ rehabilitation and stay.135 Capable of housing 200 soldiers, the school conducted classes in tailoring, agriculture, knitting, oil engine driving, cinema operating, carpentering, poultry farming, motor car driving, artificial flowers, elementary engineering, fitting and turning and electric motors.136 Of them, the most popular was the Oil Engine Drivers’ class.137 These drivers often earned a fair salary—amounting to around 75 rupees a month, which is substantially higher than the disability pension disbursed through the Government of India. Many of the men trained at the QMTI were enveloped back into the army: based on their training, they were placed as tailors in regiments or at the army clothing department.138 For instance, Gurkha regiment veteran, Bom Bahadur, whose leg had been amputated in the late war was trained in tailoring and reabsorbed back into the army as a tent mender with a monthly salary of 75 rupees.139 Others who had feet or legs amputated and were trained to drive were placed as chauffeurs at the army mechanical transport department. Equally important potential sites of employment were government dockyards, ordnance factories and arsenals. Orientalism, Race and Rehabilitation For the colonial state, rehabilitating the disabled sepoy was both pragmatic and symbolic. Rehabilitation represented not just the benevolence and gratitude of the imperial government towards the ‘limbless’ Indian soldier but also embodied the primacy of Western science and technological responses to disability. Rehabilitation was equally important as a pragmatic way to reduce some of the long-term financial burdens of an expanding pension establishment. Disability itself was tied to the loss of the ability to earn a living and subsequently impeded the economic status and mobility of entire families. Disabled sepoys were considered to be ‘robust and healthy’ apart from the loss of their limbs.140 Attempts at treating and rehabilitating these returning wounded and disabled soldiers in order to restore their economic independence were, therefore, pitched as ‘the greatest humanitarian work that has ever been attempted in India’.141 For instance, rehabilitation was estimated to be able to add between 20 and 100 rupees a month to disabled soldiers above their pensions if they stayed the course and completed the training.142 Rehabilitation was, thus, constructed as the necessary complement to the pension system; the latter represented ‘not the amount of the sufferer’s loss, but that fraction of it which it is said that the nation can “afford” to pay’.143 Whatever provisions the QMTI may have made for rehabilitation, it is worth underlining that it had a considerably limited capacity and could cater to perhaps a couple of hundred inmates at a time. The likelihood that the school was able to provide adequately for the care of the tens of thousands of disabled soldiers is, therefore, small. Consider, for instance, that only a little over 1,500 soldiers had passed through the QMTI and received training in the various trades between 1917 and 1949 in total.144 In the sanitised and glorified version published in newspapers, the roles of rehabilitative institutions were likely magnified beyond their actual impacts on the lives of disabled sepoys. The institution was publicised as the material embodiment of imperial benevolence and appreciation for sepoy participation—in newspapers as far away as the USA—where an anonymous author in the New York Times commented on how surprising and unusual the establishment of an ‘up-to-date school’ in ‘far-off India’ where her ‘disabled fighters are taught … trades to make them self-supporting’.145 Indeed, newspaper narratives completely elided the struggles to actually get soldiers to commit to the 6-month period of training, which is evident in the archives of the QMTI itself. For instance, there appears to have been a need to advertise and ‘induce’ sepoys to attend the QMTI.146 Authorities certainly appear to have struggled to attract disabled soldiers to training classes.147 By 1918, the government was advertising the institute by circulating and distributing illustrated posters and pamphlets printed in all vernacular languages in depots and regiments across the region.148 District committees and local Soldiers’ Boards were also apprised of the institute’s work and were urged to directly contact disabled Indian soldiers already on wound or invalid pensions in their districts through the pension rolls.149 In ‘up-country centers’, new district committees were established; partly because of the difficulty involving in ‘inducing … disabled soldiers already on pension’ to undergo the course of training offered at the School.150 As an additional enticement to disabled sepoys across the vast spaces of British India, Soldiers’ Boards were authorised to issue railway warrants for free travel to and from the school.151 Consistently, medical practitioners and the colonial state found that wounded soldiers who arrived in Bombay and Lahore often summarily left for their homes after being treated for their injuries at the various war hospitals.152 The Indian sepoy was variously presented as emotional, irresponsible, imprudent, intransigent and profligate. The United Provinces Soldiers Board reported that the disabled soldier was not capable of planning for the long-term ‘management’ of their impairments.153 Rather direly, the Board commented that being temporarily ‘full of money’ through wound pensions and disability reimbursements, disabled soldiers did not understand that the ‘lean years are coming sooner than they imagine’ and that learning new skills were necessary to adapt to their impairments.154 But a more careful interpretation of this apparent ‘resistance’ is necessary. Very often, veterans struggled to manage providing for their families while staying at QMTI being trained, despite reassurances that the state would provide them with family allowances and limited residential facilities for families.155 Taking up the rehabilitation courses offered by the QMTI was particularly difficult for those who lived far away from Pune, even with the enticement of free transport to the institute. There also appears to be little acknowledgement of either the considerable physical discomfort or inconvenience of travelling to the institute overland from villages and towns as far flung as Nepal, Madras and Punjab. Even if the railway warrants were accessible to soldiers, these journeys would have been extremely uncomfortable and possibly painful for sepoy veterans who were adjusting to new physical impairments. The colonial administration, however, consistently interpreted the sepoys’ hesitation to report for rehabilitation and training as (yet another) symptom of the fatalism supposedly unique to the sepoy. Notions of race certainly informed and shaped the perceptions of disability and rehabilitation among Indian soldiers. For instance, Colonel Seton, the director of the Kitchener Indian Hospital in Brighton, commented that Indian soldiers in the hospital were characterised by an ‘Oriental fatalism’ in their approach to their injuries.156 Such fatalism, he contended, was one of the main reasons why the hospital needed an orthopaedic department. The Indian injured, he argued, also risked becoming permanently disabled through ‘sheer neglect of co-operation by the patient with the surgeon’.157 Seton stated that rehabilitation was necessary as a counterpoint to the tendency of the Indian soldier who, ‘… . through carelessness or fatalism, or a desire not to recover, has converted his slightly wounded hand or leg into a permanent claw hand or permanent limp’.158 Similar narratives of ‘fatalism’ were also applied to sepoys in India when they hesitated or refused to attend rehabilitation at QMTI or at the blind schools in Bombay and Lahore, as rehabilitation was a ‘new thing and no doubt incredible’.159 What is more likely is that these newly disabled sepoys may simply have found more comfort in familiar surroundings. These discussions also underscore that when it came to the colonial establishment, there was a marked lack of familiarity or ease with local cultures around and constructions of disability that may well have influenced local responses to rehabilitation. One more plausible reason provided by the state for soldiers’ reluctance to seek training involved caste and its relationship to occupation. Caste prejudices may have proved a particular impediment for sepoys who were drawn from ‘martial castes’, who had deep seated objections towards learning trades that could have threatened their caste status.160 What is interesting is that disabled soldiers in the European metropole also evinced the same reluctance to avail of rehabilitation. The French Minister of Education, for instance, spoke at the Inter-Allied Conference of the Study of Professional Re-education in 1917 and commented that disabled soldiers refused to report for ‘re-education professionelle’ offered at several institutions because they were ignorant of the results possible in the schools or that they would lose their pensions during the period of re-education, while others believed that ‘the fact that they have wounded gives them a right to employment by the state’.161 Some French veterans accepted whatever employment they received, while others despaired altogether of being able to participate in any kind of manual labour. Concluding Remarks Long central to colonial governance and policing, the sepoy also made significant contributions in the First World War. Sepoy experiences in the trenches and frontlines of this conflict had predictable and dramatic impacts on their bodies and minds, which are perceptible both in medical reports and casualty statistics, but also through sepoys’ letters. These sources reveal a curious ambiguity about disability—on the one hand, they feared what war could do to their bodies, but, on the other hand, they also acknowledged that it was only through permanent, serious disability that sepoys could escape the war. The First World War I (WWI) also marked a significant departure in colonial attitudes and policies to injury and disability among sepoy populations, in contrast to previous decades. When British soldiers were wounded in India and invalided out of the service, they were returned to the UK and sent to the Chelsea Hospital, which offered residential care for the disabled and indigent veterans of the numerous wars fought by the armies of the Empire.162 Such practices or institutions did not exist for Indian soldiers, who usually returned to their villages after retiring or invaliding out with a wound pension. As the First World War progressed, although, the disabled sepoy could no longer be simply dispatched with a pension. Attempts at treating and rehabilitating these returning wounded and disabled soldiers were the colonial establishment’s efforts to restore their economic independence as a panacea for pension anxieties that had were already acute at the end of the Second Afghan war but had been exacerbated with WWI. Rehabilitation had the potential to teach new skills that would allow the disabled colonial subject to earn an independent livelihood and, thus, supplement pensions.163 The Great War also contributed to an unprecedented and sharpening focus on producing and distributing ‘modern’ prosthetics locally for disabled sepoys. However, evidence does suggest that medical, prosthetic and rehabilitative provisions for disabled sepoys lagged behind provisions available to soldiers in the metropole. It would be a mistake to read the British interest in rehabilitation and equipping soldiers with artificial limbs purely as imperial gratitude or benevolence—it was also a born of deeply pragmatic imperial logics. The British were well aware that the ‘spectacle of wounded and sick men in Hospital clothes will have a very depressing effect in India, and a very bad effect on recruiting’.164 Equally relevant in shaping both medical and institutional responses to the wounded sepoy returning from the fronts of this war was the crisis posed by demobilisation—which coincided with the Spanish flu pandemic and with the tides of nationalism in the colony.165 The QMTI especially came to be perceived as the most concrete expression of these motives, as a site for producing ‘useful’ colonial subjects, but was equally was seen as an important modernising influence on those who passed through its doors, as it transformed sepoys into workers who ‘fit’ into the industrial colonial economy. The disabled body of the sepoy was constructed here as an extension of the oil engines, looms, cars and machines they operated. Rehabilitation was also conceived as re-enabling disabled soldiers’ bodies and transforming them using scientific methods into productive, ‘efficient and well-disciplined’ colonial citizen-subjects.166 Untrained, the bodies of disabled veterans were not only believed to become an encumbrance to families and to societies but also had the potential to serve as a powerful reproach to the colonial government if the disabled sepoy began to swell the population of mendicants and beggars who had always been a thorn in the side of the state. In addition, these institutions were additionally intended to serve as space for psychological and emotional support, to improve the morale of these ‘despondent men’ and to ‘restore self-confidence’.167 These centres could ‘convince them (the disabled soldiers) that they can be useful citizens in spite of their disability’.168 Footnotes 1 Tulsa Daily World, 15 December 1918, 2; Anaconda Standard, 12 January 1919, 11. 2 ‘Sepoy’ was an Anglicisation of the Persian word ‘sipahi’ or soldier. 3 Manchester Guardian, 4 July 1917, 5. 4 Shrabani Basu, For King and Another Country: Indian Soldiers on the Western Front, 1914–18 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Santanu Das, ‘Imperialism, Nationalism and the First World War in India’, in Jennifer Keene and Michael Nieberg, eds, Finding Common Ground: New Directions in First World War Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 81. 5 Santanu Das, ‘Indians at Home, Mesopotamia and France, 1914–1918: Towards an Intimate History’, in Santanu Das, ed, Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 84; Rosie Llewellyn–Jones, ‘In Memory of India’s Fallen’, History Today, 2010, 60, 6–7. 6 For instance, Timothy C. Winegard, Indigenous Peoples of the British Dominions and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Philippa Levine, ‘Battle Colours: Race, Sex and Colonial Soldiery in World War I’, Journal of Women's History, 1998, 104–30. Ashley Jackson, ed. The British Empire and the First World War (London: Routledge, 2017); Basu, For King and Another Country; Richard Smith, Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race, Masculinity and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Das, Race, Empire and First World War Writing; Ray Costello, Black Tommies: British Soldiers of African Descent in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Thomas DeGeorges, ‘Still behind Enemy Lines? Algerian and Tunisian Veterans after the World Wars’, in Heike Liebau et al., eds, The World in World Wars: Experiences, Perceptions and Perspectives from Africa and Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 519–46; Hikmet Ozdemir, The Ottoman Army: 1914–1918: Disease and Death on the Battlefield (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008). 7 David Omissi, ed., Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–1918 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Ana Carden-Coyne, The Politics of Wounds: Military Patients and Medical Power in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Andrew Tait Jarboe, ‘Propaganda and Empire in the Heart of Europe: Indian Soldiers in Hospital and Prison, 1914–18’, in Richard Fogary and Andrew Jarboe, eds, Empires in World War I: Shifting Frontiers and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014); Mark Harrison, The Medical War: British Military Medicine in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Samuel Hyson and Alan Lester, ‘“British India on Trial”: Brighton Military Hospitals and the Politics of World War I’, Journal of Historical Geography, 2012, 38, 18–34. 8 Hilary Buxton, ‘Imperial Amnesia: Race, Trauma, and Indian Troops in the First World War’, Past & Present, 2018, 241, 221–58. Hilary Buxton’s article is a notable exception and a fascinating and timely examination of how trauma was racialised in Indian troops during the Great War and in the interwar period. 9 See, for instance, Jeffrey S. Reznick, ‘ History at the Intersection of Disability and Public Health: The Case of John Galsworthy and Disabled Soldiers of the First World War’, Disability and Health Journal, 2011, 4, 24–27; Mike Mantin, ‘Coalmining and the National Scheme for Disabled Ex-Servicemen after the First World War’, Social History, 2016, 41, 155–70; David Gerber, ed., Disabled Veterans in History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Beth Linker, ‘Shooting Disabled Soldiers: Medicine and Photography in World War I America’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2011, 66, 313–46; Jen Roberts, ‘The Front Comes Home: Returned Soldiers and Psychological Trauma in Australia during the First World War’, Health and History, 2015, 17, 17–36; Andrea Gerrard and Kristyn Harman, ‘“Lives Twisted out of Shape!” Tasmanian Aboriginal Soldiers and the Aftermath of the First World War’, Aboriginal History, 2015, 39, 183–201; Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Beth Linker, War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Julie Anderson, War, Disability and Rehabilitation in Britain: ‘Soul of a Nation’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). 10 This article focuses primarily on physical disabilities resulting from injury or other trauma (injuries that required physical and occupational rehabilitation) and does not examine other categories such as blindness or long-term chronic illness resulting from service. 11 British Library (BL), IOR/L/MIL/5/825/4, Report of the Indian Censors (RIC), June 1915–August 1915, Sepoy Sudar Singh to Sepoy Musteram, May 1915. 12 See Kaushik Roy, ed. The Indian Army in Two World Wars (Leiden: Brill, 2012); David Omissi, The Sepoys and the Raj (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994). 13 Aparna Nair, ‘“An Egyptian Infection”: War, Plague and the Quarantines of the English East India Company at Madras and Bombay, 1802’ Hygeia Internationalis, 2008, 8, 7–29. 14 Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire During the Great War, 1914–1920 (London: War Office, 1922), 777. 15 Santanu Das, ‘Imperialism, Nationalism and the First World War in India’, in Jennifer Keene and Michael Nieberg, eds, Finding Common Ground: New Directions in First World War Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 81. 16 Joanna Bourke, ‘The Battle of the Limbs: Amputation, Artificial Limbs and the Great War in Australia’, Australian Historical Studies, 1998, 29, 49–67. Bourke argued much the same for Australian soldiers, suggesting that there were clear disparities in the attention paid to wounds and disabilities based on race and the origin of the soldiers. 17 Statistics of the Military Effort, 350. 18 John W. Beresford Merewether and Frederick Smith, The Indian Corps in France (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1918). 19 Census of India, 1921, Sickness, Mortality and Invaliding in Indian Army (Excluding Officers), http://dsal.uchicago.edu/statistics/1910_excel/1910.187.XLS. 20 Ibid. 21 Chelmsford to Montagu, 19 December 1919, quoted in Keith Jeffery, The British Army and the Crisis of Empire, 1918–22 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 22 Antony J. Stockwell, ‘The War and the British Empire’, in John Turner, ed., Britain and the First World War (London: Routledge, 2014), 36–53. 23 BL, IOR/L/MIL/17/5/2402, Col Bruce Seton, An Analysis of 1000 Wounds and Injuries Received in Action, with Special Reference to the Theory of the Prevalence of Self–Infliction, Kitchener Indian Hospital, Brighton, 1915. 24 Suzannah Biernoff, ‘The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in First World War Britain’, Social History of Medicine, 2011, 24, 666–85. 25 Tim Cook, No Place to Run: The Canadian Corps and Gas Warfare in the First World War (Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 1999), 3. 26 Robert L. Atenstaedt, The Medical Response to the Trench Diseases in World War One (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). 27 BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/824, Admission and Discharge Books of the Indian Military Depot Hospital, Milford–on–Sea, Hampshire. 28 BL, IOR/L/MIL/17/5/2016, Cole, Report. 29 Rachel Constance, ‘In the Shadows: Contextualizing Cholera Outbreaks in the Indian Army During the Great War’ in Roger D. Long and Ian Talbot, eds, India and World War I: A Centennial Assessment (London: Routledge, 2017). 30 Report of the Commission Appointed by Act of Parliament to Enquire into the Operations of War in Mesopotamia (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1917), 71; Mark Harrison, ‘The Fight against Disease in the Mesopotamia Campaign’, in Peter Liddle and Hugh Cecil, eds, Facing Armageddon (London: Pen and Sword, 2003), 475, 477. 31 Wellcome Library, RAMC/739/19, Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into ‘Shell-Shock (London: Her Majesty’s Office, 1922), 8–10; Buxton, ‘Imperial Amnesia’, 221–58. 32 Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); Susan Vankoski, ‘Letters Home, 1915–16: Punjabi Soldiers Reflect on War and Life in Europe and their Meanings for Home and Self’, International Journal of Punjab Studies, 1995, 2, 43–63. Others have used these letters to examine selfhood, caste, race and sepoys’ relationship with the Raj and their position within the Empire. 33 BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/2, RIC, March 1915—April 1915, 5; BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/4, RIC, June 1915–August 1915, From Sangare Jide to Sangara Ram, May 1915; Omissi, Indian Voices, 32. 34 BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/2, RIC, March 1915–April 1915, ASR to a Friend, 19 March 1915; BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/4, RIC, June 1915–August 1915, Nand Lal to Jairam, June 1915; BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/828/2, RIC, December 1914–July 1918. Rev. Father Cry to Dr. Brother Moulman, 2 April 1918. 35 BL, IOR/L.MIL/5/827/6, RIC, Dec 1917–March 1918, Bhagat Singh to Harnam Singh, 16 January 1918; IOR/L/MIL/5/825/4, RIC, June 1915–August 1915, Fakir Khan to Ghulamdin, 11 June 1915; BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/1, RIC, December 1914–April 1915, X.Y to Relative; Ibid., From a Sikh to a Friend in India, 29 January 1915. 36 BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/4, RIC, June 1915–August 1915, Ramnath Sing to Singh Sahib, May 1915. 37 Omissi, Indian Voices, 36. 38 BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/4, RIC, June 1915–August 1915, From Jodh Singh to Sahib Singh, 4 June, 1915. 39 BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/4, RIC, June 1915–August 1915 Sepoy Sher Khan to Sepoy Alam Shah; Pirzada to Saman Khan and Hasan Shah, 3 June 1915. 40 Omissi, Indian Voices, 38. 41 ‘Letter from Ragbir Singh to Gajander Singh, 8 April 1915’, in Omissi, ed., Indian Voices, 53. 42 ‘Letter from Sepoy Baghal Singh to His Brother, 6 April 1915’, in Omissi, ed. Indian Voices, 52. 43 BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/4, RIC, June 1915–August 1915, From Jodh Singh to Sahib Singh, 4 June 1915. 44 BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/826/1, RIC, December 1915–January 1916, Phina Ram to Lachman Brahman, 28 December 1915. 45 Ibid. 46 Times of India (henceforth,TOI), 17 May 1917, 8. 47 Hardinge to Lawrence, April 14, 1915, EUR/MSS/F143/73, cited in Hyson and Lester; TOI, 16 January 1919, 8. 48 BL, IOR/L/MIL/17/5/2402, Bruce Seton, An Analysis of 1000 Wounds and Injuries Received in Action, with Special Reference to the Theory of the Prevalence of Self–Infliction, 1915; BL, IOR/L/MIL/17/5/2384, Indian Force for Europe, India Office Military Department, 6 September 1914; Das, Race, Empire and First World War Writing, 16. 49 George Morton-Jack, The Indian Army on the Western Front: India’s Expeditionary Force to France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 290; Andrew Thompson, Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 279. 50 BL, IOR/L/MIL/17/5/2402. Seton, An Analysis. 51 BL, IOR/L/MIL/17/5/2016, Cole, Report. 52 Ibid. 53 Maharashtra State Archives (MSA), General Files, 3649: CN 1366, 1917. 54 TOI, 10 December 1914, 7. 55 MSA, General 4420, 1080, 1917; MSA, General 4612, CN 129, 1917. 56 MSA, General 4524, CN 1529, 1917; The Times, 14 August 1919, 7. 57 MSA, General 3529, CN 1080; General, 3586, 1916; General 3586, CN 1198, 1916; General 3748, 1589, 1916–17. 58 BL, 17th Stationary Hospital Gazette. Cumballa War Hospital, 1 (January 1917). 59 Sarah Glassford, Mobilising Mercy: A History of the Canadian Red Cross (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 81–129. 60 TOI, 27 October 1899, 5; NAI, Medical Branch, April 1910, 64, PART B, Memorandum on the Indian branch of the St. Johns Ambulance Association; NAI, Home Department, Police Branch, May 1910, 33–46, PART B. 61 TOI, 4 May 1910, 8; Ceylon Observer, 4 February 1889, 19. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 TOI, 7 Oct 1914, 7. For instance, by the end of September 1914, the Simla YMCA donated 3,000 rupees to the Indian St. John Ambulance Association, and Bombay Presidency donated twice as much. 65 Ibid; TOI, 26 June 1915, 11. 66 NAI, Home Department, Medical Branch, January 1920, File Numbers 121–22. 67 Ibid. 68 BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/18481, Army Department, No. 4 of 1919. Although India Office records hint that this Dehra Dun centre also was intended to train soldiers in ‘some useful trade’, records in the National Archives in New Delhi instead reported that the Institute only provided physical rehabilitation. 69 NAI, Home Department, Medical Branch, File Numbers 121–22, January 1920. 70 BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/18481, No 425, File 1309, Army Department No. 4, 1919. 71 Ibid. 72 TOI, 26 June 1915, 11. 73 New York Times, 27 October 1918, 41; Douglas McMurtie, The Disabled Soldier (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1919) 203–04. 74 See also Samiksha Sehrawat, Colonial Medical Care in North India: Gender, State and Society, c.1830–1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 2013). 75 Mesopotamia Commission, 10. Even before they arrived in India, wounded soldiers (British or Indian) had to navigate an unsanitary, inefficient medical transport system. Hospital ships arriving in Basra were described as festooned with ‘dried stalactites of human faeces’ and soldiers lying in a ‘pool of dysentery’. Wounded soldiers had their limbs splinted with wood strips from whisky boxes, ‘Bhoosa wire’. 76 See David Arnold, ‘Medical Priorities and Practice in Nineteenth-Century British India’, South Asia Research, 1985, 5, 167–83; Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1859–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 77 BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/18481, Extract of an Army Despatch from the Government of India, No. 14, 5 February 1919. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Mesopotamia Commission, 72. 81 Ibid. 82 Morton-Jack, The Indian Army, 336. Sepoys may have preferred their own food, in order to maintain religious and caste boundaries and identities. 83 Sehrawat, Colonial Medical Care, 233–41. 84 Ibid. 85 Abdullah Hussein, The Weary Generations (London: Peter Owen, 2014), 120–21. 86 Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing Press, 1918), 208–09. 87 Desh, 16 November 1915, 692; quoted in Jarboe, ‘Propaganda and Empire’, 221. 88 TOI, 16 January 1919, 7. 89 The Leader, 20 April 1917, 1. 90 The Tribune, 17 July 1915, 4. 91 Carden-Coyne, The Politics of Wounding, 205. 92 The Leader, 30 August 1916, 8. 93 Laurel Daen, ‘A Hand for the One-Handed’: Prosthesis User-Inventors and the Market for Assistive Technologies in Early Nineteenth Century Britain’, in Claire Jones, ed., Rethinking Modern Prostheses in Anglo-American Commodity Cultures, 1820–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 93–114; Vanessa Warne, ‘Artificial Leg’, Victorian Review, 2008, 34, 29–33. 94 The Indian Medical Gazette, 1 March 1875, 10, 73. 95 Report of the Army Medical Department, Great Britain, Volume 39 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1898), 391. 96 Christopher Alan Bayly and Timothy Norman Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 370. 97 George Watt, A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India, Volume I (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1889), 386. The carefully cleaned leaf sheath of the bamboo stalk was utilised both as a splint as well as an artificial limb with the stump of the leg being inserted at the open end of the bamboo. 98 The Pioneer, 2 August 1886, 1–2. 99 The Leader, 30 August 1916, 8. 100 ‘Letter from Rajwali Khan to Ghulam Hussain, Sept 4, 1915’ in Omissi, Indian Voices, 98. 101 Vocational Rehabilitation of Disabled Soldiers and Sailors: A Preliminary Study (Washington, DC: Federal Board for Vocational Education, 1918), 263. 102 The Leader, 30 August 1916, 8. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid. 107 Queen Mary Technical Institute Library (QL), Queen Mary’s Minute Book,(QMMB) Volume I, Minutes, 21 January 1918, 1. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid. 110 The Spatula, October 1920, 113–14. 111 Ibid. 112 Tribune, 29 November 1917, 5. 113 Henri Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, William Sayers, trans. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 121–91. 114 Julie Anderson, War, Disability and Rehabilitation in Britain: ‘Soul of a Nation’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). 115 Jeffrey Reznick, ‘Material Culture and the ‘After-Care’ of Disabled Soldiers in Britain During the Great War’, in Paul Cornich and Nicholas J. Saunders, eds, Bodies in Conflict: Corporeality, Materiality and Transformation (London: Routledge, 2014). 116 Maud Adeline Brereton, The Future of our Disabled Sailors and Soldiers (London: Knapp, Drewett and Sons, 1917). 117 BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/18481, Army Department, No. 4 of 1919. 118 TOI, 17 May 1917, 7. The school was later renamed the Queen Mary School for Disabled Soldiers. Today, it is known as the Queen Mary Technical Institute and will henceforth be referred to as the QMTI. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid. 121 QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 21 November 1918. 122 BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/12521, Annexure to GRO No. 735, 10 November 1917. 123 QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, Feb 7, 1918. Notably, the committee had included the founder of the Tata business house—Jamsetji Jeejeebhoy Tata. 124 TOI, 14 May 1918, 8. 125 Tata Steel Archives, Box No 314, File No. 178, Part II. 126 QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 21 January 1918. 127 QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 10 September 1919; Minutes, 20 March 1920. 128 Ibid. 129 QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 9 August 1918. 130 BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/18582, Army Department Letter No. 18899, 22 December 1917. 131 BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/12521, Annexure to GRO No. 735,, 10 November 1917. 132 Ibid. 133 Indian Soldiers’ Board: Report for the Year Ending the 31st March 1931 (Delhi: Government of India Press, 1931), 9; Tai Yong Tan, ‘Maintaining the Military Districts: Civil–Miltiary Integration and District Soldiers’ Boards in the Punjab, 1919–1939’, Modern Asian Studies, 1994, 28, 833–74. 134 BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/12521, No. 269, File 266. 135 Ibid. 136 BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/12521, Annexure to GRO No. 735, 10 November 1917. 137 QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 15 February 1918. 138 BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/18446; Vocational Rehabilitation. 139 QL, QMTI Annual Report, 1950–51. 140 TOI, 17 May 1917, 7. 141 TOI, 29 September 1917, 10. 142 BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/12521, Annexure to GRO No. 735, 10 November 1917. 143 TOI, 8 February 1917, 8. 144 TOI, 11 January 1949, 9. 145 New York Times, 27 October 1918. 146 QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 21 January 1918. 147 QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 8 July 1919. 148 QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 7 February 1918. 149 Ibid. 150 QL, QMMB, Volume I, 15 February 1918. 151 BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/12521, No. 269, File 266. Army Department, Delhi, 20 March 1924. 152 The Leader, 16 November 1919, 9. 153 Indian Soldiers’ Board, 9. 154 Ibid. 155 Ibid, QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 4 June 1918; Minutes, 9 August 1918. 156 BL, IOR/L/MIL/17/5/2016, Colonel Bruce Seton, A Report on the Kitchener Indian Hospital, Brighton, 1916. 157 Ibid. 158 Ibid. 159 BL, IOR/L/MIL/18481, Army Department No. 4, 1919, 10 January 1919. 160 Ibid. 161 Lt. Colonel Sir A Griffith Boscawen, Report on the Inter–Allied Conference for the Study of Professional Re-education, and Other Questions of Interest to Soldiers and Sailors Disabled by the War (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1917), 7. 162 The Pioneer, 5 May 1895, 8. 163 BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/12521, Annexure to GRO No. 735, 10 November 1917. 164 TNA, WO 32/5110, 15 June 1915, quoted in Jarboe, ‘Propaganda and Empire’, 212. 165 Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State: Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–1947 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005), 98–187. 166 TOI, 30 October 1919, 9. 167 TOI, 20 December 1946, 10. 168 Ibid. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Ravi Ahuja, Sara Scalenghe, Kim Nielsen, Mike Rembis and Radhika Gupta for their comments and assistance over the several months it took to write this article. I work on disability history in the Global South and also work on ethnographic examinations of chronic illness in contemporary South India. I teach a range of subjects, including disability, race, imperialism, public health and medical histories. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - ‘These Curly-Bearded, Olive-Skinned Warriors’: Medicine, Prosthetics, Rehabilitation and the Disabled Sepoy in the First World War, 1914–1920
JF - Social History of Medicine
DO - 10.1093/shm/hkz002
DA - 2019-02-27
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/these-curly-bearded-olive-skinned-warriors-medicine-prosthetics-CRhnwQcdsr
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -