India, Empire, and First World War Culture

Santanu Das, educated in Kolkata and Cambridge, is Professor of English Literature at King's College London and joins All Souls College, Oxford as Senior Research Fellow in English in 2019. He is the author of the award-winning monograph Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge, 2006) and the pictorial history Indian Troops in Europe, 1914–1918 (2014), and the editor of Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge, 2011) and the Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War (Cambridge, 2013). He presented the series 'Soldiers of the Empire' for BBC Radio 4 and has contributed to various events commemorating the war, from radio and television programmes to exhibitions, performances, and concerts.

'India, Empire and First World War Culture is an astonishing achievement, an amazing feat of scholarship that unearths an extraordinary range of sources and fragments. Through close and sensitive readings of poems, songs, paintings, photographs and a diverse range of objects, Santanu Das succeeds in unmuting a vast host of voices that have for far too long been silenced or forgotten. Rarely have the skills of the literary critic and historian been as imaginatively fused as in India, Empire and First World War Culture.' Amitav Ghosh, author of The Great Derangement

• 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.