The Indian Army: Manpower Reserve of the British Empire, Part III—Aftermath of the Great War

King George V Inspecting Indian Troops
on the Western Front

During the First World War the strength of the Indian Army rose sixfold to over 1,400,000 men. By the end of the war 1,100,000 men had served overseas at a cost of 70,000 dead. India had contributed more men to the fighting than Canada and Australia combined. Eleven individuals of Indian ancestry earned the Victoria Cross during the struggle.

Besides the colossal manpower contribution, the British also raised money from India, as well as large supplies of food and ammunition, collected both by British taxation of Indians and from the nominally autonomous Princely States. In return, the British had insincerely promised to deliver progressive self-rule to India at the end of the war. Perhaps, had they kept that pledge, the sacrifices of India's First World War soldiers might have been seen in their homeland as a contribution to India's freedom.

Postwar: Guarding the Khyber Pass, 1919

But the British broke their word. Mahatma Gandhi, who returned to his homeland for good from South Africa in January 1915, supported the war, as he had supported the British in the Boer War. The great Nobel Prize-winning poet, Rabindranath Tagore, was somewhat more sardonic about nationalism. "We, the famished, ragged ragamuffins of the East are to win freedom for all humanity!" he wrote during the war. [Yet} We have no word for 'nation' in our language." During hostilities India was wracked by high taxation to support the war and the high inflation accompanying it, while the disruption of trade caused by the conflict led to widespread economic losses—all this while the country was also reeling from a raging influenza epidemic that took many lives. But nationalists widely understood from British statements that at the end of the war India would receive the Dominion Status hitherto reserved for the "White Commonwealth."

With British policy providing such a sour ending to the narrative of a war in which India had given its all and been spurned in return, Indian nationalists felt that the country had nothing to thank its soldiers for. They had merely gone abroad to serve their foreign masters. Losing your life or limb in a foreign war fought at the behest of your colonial rulers was an occupational hazard—it did not qualify to be hailed as a form of national service.

Indian Troops Responding to a Nationalist Protest, Bombay

An Indian independence movement came to a head after the war when the first series of non-violent campaigns of civil disobedience was launched by the Indian National Congress under the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi—whose methods were inspired to a large extent by the philosophy and methods of Baba Ram Singh, a Sikh who led the Kuka Movement in Punjab in the 1870s. Gandhi's movement came to encompass people from across India and across all walks of life. These initial civil disobedience movements soon came to be the driving force that ultimately shaped the cultural, religious, and political unity of a then still dis-united nation. The sacrifices of the Great War and the intense disappointments that followed fueled this movement. Another World War would intervene, but eventually, India would become independent.

Sources: BBC; Wikipedia; CWGC

Read Part I, The Coming of War, HERE

Read Part II, Deployment,  HERE