Santanu Das's remarkably well-researched India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs excavates the untold stories of the marginalized—combatants, noncombatants, civilians, and women—from undivided India whose lives the First World War had touched. Despite India's geographical vastness, more than half of the over one million Indians who participated in the war were from specific districts of the Punjab, the region now divided between Pakistan and India. These districts had become military catchment areas after the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and publication of Eden Commission Report of 1879 that contributed to construct the image of martial races. With the eye of an artist and sensitivity of a poet, Das wins humanity for all of them, and he offers an explanation, albeit subtextual and unintentional, of continued dominance of soldiers and officers from these areas in the Pakistani military.

Das's holistic approach in this highly original work to study the culture of the war decisively contends that it is impossible to confine the war to the Western experience alone. His compelling argument rests on diverse, and unconventional, sociocultural, political, and literary resources like folk songs, speeches of politicians, and voice recordings of prisoners of war, as well as English and Indian writers’ presentation of the world during and after the war. Das spent more than ten years researching for India, Empire, and First World War Culture, and through that process, he expands the definition of an archive as he consults personal collections of soldiers’ families, conducts interviews, analyzes pamphlets, and studies the spread of rumors. His exploration of unusual resources led him to discover valuable “unknown texts” (77).

In the introduction, Das seamlessly and eloquently weaves the apparently disparate stories of Joginder Sen's bloodied glasses; Mall Singh's voice recording as a prisoner of war in Germany; young Kishen Devi's letter to her father serving at the front in Egypt; and the diary of a deserter and rebel, Mir Mast, which records his newly acquired English vocabulary. Each story narrates the life underneath the officially encouraged representations of sepoys. Devi's letter perhaps most effectively reveals Punjab's ambivalence toward participation in the war and the emotional crisis its people faced. The best elegies pale in comparison with her innocent expression of the anxiety that receiving a letter from the front entails. Speaking for the voiceless, Das emphasizes the power of the “unsophisticated” but honest depiction of loss by juxtaposing Punjabi women's folk songs with the artificiality of the refined English verse by Indian poets (114).

The four parts provide a fresh view of the reasons for India's participation in the war, representation of sepoys in the West, what the sepoy felt, and how the Indian intellectuals responded to the war. The structure comes full circle as it oscillates from home front to the battlefront, to the heart of the sepoy, and then back home. Das perceptively observes that it would be reductive to look at Indian soldiers as “volunteers” or “mercenaries” (77); the reasons for joining the war were diverse, ranging from possibilities of improving socioeconomic status to upholding the traditional concept of izzat, translated as honor (80). At that time, an important factor prompting enlistment into military service was that Indians were seeking an identity that made them proud of their Indianness and their religious roots but at the same time proved to the British, through their fighting prowess, that they were equal to them, a sentiment that all non-white participants shared (30). While exploring the economic, cultural, religious, and familial motives to enlist, Das also shows the contradictory position of influential political figures like Gandhi, the twentieth-century prophet of nonviolence, and their influence on encouraging recruitment.

Cultural and socioeconomic conditions of different communities determined their response to recruitment campaigns. Das convincingly demonstrates that by 1918 coercion had become the most effective mode of recruitment, even in rural Punjab. This did not translate into lack of “agency” for the recruited men (221), who found ingenious and extreme ways, including faking insanity and causing self-injury, to undermine authority and escape the service. Das reads these actions as “resistance taking place off-stage” (221). In February 1915 in Singapore, more than eight hundred soldiers of 5th Light Infantry, mostly from Punjab, who had connections with Ghadar Party, mutinied. This weeklong mutiny exposed fault lines in the relationship between India and the empire. Das's insightful exploration of it was missed in this thoroughly researched work.

Building on Edward Said's critique of E. M. Forster's lack of engagement with India in A Passage to India, Das deconstructs the memoirs of British officers and traces their limitations to move beyond racial divides to connect with Indian soldiers. The officers assimilated the existing stereotypes about different ethnic and religious groups. They considered themselves not to be racist, but they failed to recognize their tendency to maintain their racial privilege and believe that an injured Indian soldier deserved less attention than did a healthy British soldier.

Das “democratise[s]” the undivided India's experience of the war by including a variety of social groups and discussing the works of well-known and unknown Indian writers and poets (348). This makes India, Empire, and First World War Culture an important milestone in deconolonizing sociocultural memory of India, whose impact goes well beyond cultural, modernist, and postcolonial studies.