Material culture in the Indian Army during the First World War

印度为第一次世界大战贡献了最多的兵力；超过140万人被征召入伍，其中6万至7万人战死。尽管如此，印度陆军士兵和其他殖民地军队的角色在关于战争的文献中被大大低估了，这些文献历来优先考虑书面和口头证据，而不是通过研究物质文化收集的关于生活实践的新观点。鉴于印度陆军士兵中文盲率很高，这一点尤为重要，其中许多人来自文盲的北印度社区，这些社区是植根于军事种族理论的征兵政策故意针对的目标。因此，很少有印度士兵写信回家，而那些写信回家的人通常是由一名会说两种语言的英国军官抄写，然后通过印度邮政的审查。因此，历史学家从不完整的、经过精心整理的叙述中拼凑出了印度军队的经历。加上欧洲战地摄影师拍摄的照片，以及大英图书馆保存的“印度办公室”记录，这些都是记录印度对战争贡献的关键资源。正如最近美国人权协会资助的项目“谁的记忆？”帝国战争博物馆强调，殖民地对战争的贡献得到的报道很少，这一主题为历史学家提供的未开发历史的“丰富领域”值得更深入地研究，并永久地纳入主流叙事。“通过结合非语言的人工制品，该项目补充了传统档案，提供了广泛的主要来源，讲述了印度军队在第一次世界大战中的经历。”在缺乏口头描述的情况下，穿着整齐的身体是一个强有力的调查对象；它是意图的表现，是服饰和身体保养实践的场所，它可能符合或抵制多种信仰和价值体系，这些信仰和价值体系规定了理想的穿着身体，这在现有的关于战争期间殖民军事力量的学术研究中尚未得到探索。通过重新引入穿着的身体，该项目以印度陆军士兵为中心，定位其对战争的描述。

India contributed the most men of any country to the First World War; over 1,400,000 men were recruited, and between 60,000-70,000 of these men were killed in action. Despite this, the role of Indian Army soldiers - and of other colonial armies - is vastly underrepresented in literature on the War, which has historically prioritised written and verbal evidence over the new perspectives about lived practices that can be gleaned through the study of material culture. This is particularly important given the high rates of illiteracy amongst Indian Army soldiers, many of whom came from illiterate north Indian communities deliberately targeted by recruiting policies rooted in the theory of martial races. As a result, very few Indian soldiers wrote letters home, and those that did typically used a bilingual British officer to transcribe the words that were then passed through a Censor for Indian Mail. Historians have therefore pieced together the Indian Army experience from incomplete, highly curated accounts. Together with photographs taken by European war photographers, and 'India Office' records held at the British Library, these have been the key resources for any record of the Indian contribution to the War. As the recent AHRC-funded project Whose Remembrance? at the Imperial War Museum highlighted, colonial contributions to the War have received poor coverage and the 'rich territory' of untapped histories this topic offers to historians 'deserves to be more intensively pursued and permanently included in mainstream narratives.'By incorporating non-verbal artefacts, this project supplements the traditional archive with an extensive range of primary sources that speak to the Indian Army experience of the First World War. The dressed body is a powerful subject of investigation where verbal accounts are missing; it is a manifestation of intention and a site for practices of dress and body maintenance that may conform to or resist multiple belief and value systems that prescribe the ideal dressed body, which has gone unexplored in the existing scholarship on colonial military forces during the War. By reintroducing the dressed body, this project orientates its account of the War with the Indian Army soldier at the centre.