Something new from inter-library loan: Briton Cooper Busch’s Britain, India, and the Arabs: 1914-1921, a history of British and Indian (that is, the British Government of India’s) policies in the Middle East during the First World War. Busch argues that the Indian Office had far more of an effect on British war and post-war policy in the region than it’s usually credited for. The imperial Government of India was skeptical and argued with London when British diplomats like Henry McMahon were negotiating with Hussein ibn Ali, Sharif of Mecca, or Ibn Sa’ud, eventual king of Saudi Arabia, on Arab state indepedence. To officials in New Delhi, the idea of Arab Muslim independece was unsettling. Indian Muslim opinion was a concern (some of the war strategy in Mesopotamia often considered possibile Muslim reaction in India), but it existed for the sake of British control over India. In the end, of course, Britain was never actually genuine about those negotiations.

Map from The Times (London), Monday, May 1, 1916. Times Digital Archive. 

But onto the better point from this read: where are the Indian voices? The author states outright that his research was of government archives in London and New Dehli—like the recommended articles of a few days ago—but it is a shame that the history of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, though pretty widely and extensively told, relies so heavily on memos, telegrams, and minutes from Whitehall and New Dehli. A number of first-hand accounts of the British-Indian war in Mesopotamia do exist, from generals and majors, on down to more common army captains. None of these are Indian soldier accounts, though; publishing opportunities for a Punjabi soldier, it seems, were barely available in British India and among an army where even the highest-ranking Indian officer was subordinate to a British officer. 

The value of a book like David Omissi’s, then, only increases as the variously-titled histories of Britain’s early Iraq war pile up. Because without the likes of Indian Voices of the Great War, which itself only includes a handful of Mesopotamian letters, steady examples like this remain voiceless, hardly quoting or conveying the soldiers’ experience then:

In December 1915 the hopes and plans of total victory in Iraq had been undermined, then destroyed, by Townshend’s retreat and the siege at Kut al-’Amara. Every relief attempt failed, and in April 1916 Townshend’s men marched into captivity, many never to be heard from again. The story is a gruesome one of incompetence and overoptimism, and survivors’ accounts bear witness to near-criminal negligence in matters of supply, transport, and medical facilities. Kut’s surrender had only one virtue: it made perfectly clear that India [the British Government of India] was incompetent to conduct an overseas campaign of this scope.

- Briton Cooper Busch, Britain, India, and the Arabs: 1914-1921 (Los Angeles: 1971), 110.