The “unskilled and infinitely replaceable” (3) coolie emerges as indispensable and fundamental to Britain's First World War effort in Radhika Singha's pioneering new book, The Coolie's Great War Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914–1921. Singha traces the journeys of the noncombatant ranks of the Indian army from villages, “tribal” settlements, and jails in colonial India to theaters of the war in France and Mesopotamia. Scholars emphasizing the global nature of the World Wars have highlighted the role of the colonies in supplying both manpower and material to the war efforts of the imperial powers. Research in this field has brought to the surface histories of the over four million nonwhite men who participated in the First World War. These histories include David Killingray's work on African involvement, Xu Guoqi on the Chinese labor corps, and Richard Fogarty on colonial subjects in the French army. Recently, Santanu Das has looked at the feelings, desires, and cultural worlds of the sepoy (Indian soldier). In bringing to the forefront hitherto invisible historical actors, Singha recasts not only histories of the Great War from a South Asian perspective but also histories of labor, the military, and conflict more generally.

Based on a decade's worth of research and a staggering range of archival sources, including government records, memoirs, newspapers, jail records, and various publications that reflect sentiments from above and below, Singha describes the backbreaking work done by some 563,369 noncombatants as mule-drivers, stretcher-bearers, cooks, sweepers, water-carriers, stevedores, and construction workers and in a range of other service roles. Traditional monolithic constructions of “coolie” and “menial” workers are broken down to show Indian labor as being highly heterogeneous and mobile (complementing Singha's earlier work on borders and movement). Race, caste, imperial dynamics, and workers’ agency are central to her analysis. Singha takes a longer-term view of the war itself, looking at the period 1914–1921, demonstrating that the end of war was not so clear-cut for these people at the margins, many of whom were drafted into service in the Middle East while others tried to find their place in an evolved political landscape in postwar India.

Singha situates the coolie in historical patterns of imperial labor recruitment, circulation, and mobilization, and amid ongoing debates on indentured labor. Long traditions of recruiting labor for colonial frontier-building (chapter 1) and from among “aboriginal” and “tribal populations” from Bihar, Orissa, and northeast India (chapter 4) fed into noncombatant recruitment strategies and are considered alongside the novel deployment of prison labor for the Jail Porter and Labour Corps in Mesopotamia (chapter 3). The latter case raises important points—the likelihood of coercion behind a veneer of “voluntary” recruitment and colonial India's place in global conversations around penology (111–12) (Singha's first book, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India [1998], delves deep into the making of criminal law).

Racial and social divisions, entrenched further by military hierarchies, are referred to evocatively through the recurring idea of lines—“lines of caste and wage” (52), “front lines,” and “status lines” (chapter 2)—lines that divided but that also became increasingly permeable, although to different degrees. Divisions were maintained between British and “colored” manpower, combatants and noncombatants, and even then, between white noncombatants and “colored” combatants (38–39). The colonial government drew upon old stereotypes about so-called martial races in hiring soldiers, separated from followers in terms of their exposure and proximity to the front line despite the danger of noncombatant work. The divide was maintained through wages, pension and injury benefits, rations, and even Christmas presents (53). Within follower ranks, calculated distinctions were upheld between higher followers (mule-, bollock- and camel-drivers) and attached followers (public followers like cooks, sweepers, and grass-cutters and privately hired barbers, washermen, mess waiters, tailors, and officers’ personal servants) (50–51). The urgent need for labor necessitated greater integration into the army and modifying institutional labels to destigmatize certain kinds of work. While at times followers were able to use their indispensability as leverage to negotiate improvements in service conditions, Singha highlights the limits of social mobility with attached followers mostly from lower and “untouchable” castes unable to escape “menial” status and “polluting” work, which made them vulnerable to poor pay and discretionary disciplinary regimes. Chances of recognition were few. The government was unwilling to put combatants and followers on the same plane—“[t]o treat both alike would be both unpopular and impolitic” (295). Singha also suggests the “wartime code of hyper-masculinity” (37) and the Indian intelligentsia's emphasis on the soldier's “hypermasculine persona” (323) pegged noncombatants below combatants.

Striking details include how plurality played out in diverse settings, such as in the case of the ill Hindu carpenter who, influenced by a Tamil Christian's story about the healing powers of Christ, donated five rupees to a Wesleyan church in Hyderabad (136); how white officers were parodied and masculinity was subverted in theatricals (137); and how prejudices in a French village shifted after Oraon Catholics began cleaning streets and singing in church (236). The discussion on how Indians negotiated for superior-quality artificial limbs —a “rrubberr” leg that ended up as an “exhibition toy” (285)—is a fascinating insight into the legacies of wartime service for marginalized actors. An intriguing question is what happened to the families left behind and the women who undertook the vast bulk of agricultural labor in the absence of the men. The caregiving nature of some of the work in highly masculinized settings raises questions about gender in racially coded spaces.

The transnational perspective widens the spatial panoramas of Indian labor and migration and demonstrates the intricate workings of the imperial war machine. Singha significantly deepens our understanding of wartime labor regimes and ordinary peoples’ experiences of conflict through her analysis of noncombatant labor in an intensely hierarchical organization, in unfamiliar geographies and arduous climatic conditions, their complex experiences of work and ill health, what they did for leisure, how ideas came to be exchanged, and the remnants of war service that they carried with them. In The Coolie's Great War, Singha compellingly allows “the unimaginable to be imagined—the sweeper to be cast as a war hero” (45).