Introduction
On the 11 July 1916, Captain G. Tweedy, the newly appointed and second chief censor of Indian military correspondence in France, alerted his superiors to a slip of paper he had found hidden in an otherwise anodyne letter by a Punjabi Musalman sipahi. It was the nature of the concealed missive, as much as the fact that it was hidden, that alarmed Tweedy. It took the form of a message that had been relayed from the Prophet Muhammad, and the injunctions contained therein directed the Muslim soldiery of British India to put their loyalty in their faith rather than in their sahibs:
786. Order of Mustapha
Order of the Highness the Prophet Mahomet to Sheikh Ahmad, Khadin [sic ‘Khadim’ or Custodian] of the auspicious Mauseleum at Medina.
I Sheikh Ahmad of Medina saw in a dream the Prophet reading the Koran. He said to me ‘Sheikh Ahmad I am weary beyond all measure of their sins. Between two Fridays 9 lakhs of people died, of whom only 70,000 were in the true faith and all the rest were Kafirs. God Almighty sent the angels to me with the following message “Mahomet, look at the condition of your followers. I can bear it no longer and I shall have to change the state of things because your devotees are full of sin. They have given up their prayers and do not give the Zakat to the poor. They devote themselves to theft and backbiting, fornication, false evidence, eating swine's flesh, and misappropriation of others property. They do not keep their caste and do not give alms to the poor and disobey my orders. They are too much devoted to the world and in fact all Mahomedans are guilty of these sins. Therefore I think it necessary to change them into the original type of Mahomedans.” His Highness the Prophet prayed God to bear with His people and promised to issue further instructions to Islam and said “If they do not hear this last injunction then Thou are the Master do as Thou pleasest.” Then the Prophet said to me “Instruct all the followers of Islam that the Day of Judgement is at hand and the sun will soon rise in the West and the mountains will begin to burn. These are the signs of the end of the world.” Once more [in the past] I gave this warning to the faithful but no one attended to it and [they] grew even more absorbed in sinful pleasures. Now I issue clear orders to the faithful to avoid the sins I have mentioned and that they should call to mind the manifold pains and anxieties the Prophet has undergone for their salvation. Do Musalmans want the Prophet to spend all his time in begging God's forgiveness for their sins? The Prophet has clearly said that if you do not obey this last call he will have nothing more to do with you and will implore the Almighty no more for you. Whoever will copy this message and circulate it from city to city and read it out to others the Prophet will stand by him in the Last Day, and who does not do this will be his enemy and he will do nothing to save him however regular and abstinent his life may be. Sheikh Ahmad takes a solemn oath that this dream is true, and that if it is not true he prays God to smite him dead as an unbeliever. This news has come from Medina the Holy. Impress on every Mahomedan to obey the instruction if he wishes to escape from Hell fire.’Footnote 1
That this letter was written, posted, and recorded at all was due to particular, and peculiar, discourses of colonial military paternalism in the Indian Army. Indian sipahis were the epitome of Kipling's half-savage/half-child, in need of a nurturing, civilizing hand, and back-of-the-hand-discipline. They were both provided with more generous welfare provisions (from batta payments to the activity of District Soldiers’ Boards)Footnote 2 and disciplined more harshly than their white peers (flogging was used as a summary punishment in the Indian Army until 1920).Footnote 3 The attitude of the Indian Army towards letters written by its soldiers was shaped by these discourses of military paternalism. From the beginning of the First World War, the Indian Army encouraged its soldiers to write home to assuage feelings of anxiety, loneliness, and despondency. The Army provided green, self-sealing letter cards and encouraged soldiers to scribble down their thoughts once a week. Military officials remarked with some amazement at the numbers of sipahis who learned to write just so they could pen their own letters.Footnote 4 Soldiers enthusiastically requested language primers and newspapers, and even took to incorporating French phrases in their prose to add to or cover any gaps in their knowledge of their vernacular: ‘Of course people would laugh, but “can en fait rien” [sic].’Footnote 5 For those who remained illiterate or unable to write a full letter, there was an intimate, shared literacy which involved asking a friend or acquaintance in the platoon to help pen a letter—a collective literacy of shared language, metaphor, and sentiment. By the autumn of 1915, up to 50,000 letters were being written by, to, and between Indian soldiers in France every week, and, one would expect, tens of thousands more from sipahis in East Africa and the Middle East. And those letters by soldiers that conveyed suitable amounts of humility and deference became prototypes for propaganda pieces for British Military Intelligence, such as Rudyard Kipling's fictionalized correspondence written in 1917 to counter Indian nationalist activity in the United States of AmericaFootnote 6 and later published as The Eyes of Asia:
We have been deceived by the nature of the English. They have not at any time shown us anything of their possessions or their performances. We are not even children beside them. They have dealt with us as though they were themselves children talking chotee boli (little talk). In this manner the ill-informed have been misled. Nothing is known in India of the great strength of this people. Make that perfectly clear to all fools. [. . .] There is no reason except the nature of the English that anything in their dominions should stand up which has been ordered to lie down. It is only their soft nature which saves evil from destruction. As the saying is, ‘We thought it was only an armed horseman. Behold, it is an elephant bearing a tower!’Footnote 7
But although sipahis were allowed to speak, they were never permitted to speak freely. The decision to allow Indian soldiers to voice their fears and concerns was made to further institutionalize and perfect military paternalism. After Indian soldiers arrived in France in the winter of 1914, their letters were no longer censored as they were in British battalions—by an orderly reading aloud a selection of letters to a junior officer entrusted to excise any that betrayed operational details. A special chief censor of Indian Mails was appointed whose purpose, with the help of his staff, was to read, analyse, translate, and record every letter sent by and to a sipahi in the field. The space of speech was created as an intelligence exercise: to monitor disillusionment and counter seditious activity,Footnote 8 as well as, more mundanely, to prevent the exchange of operational information. In the written records of sipahis’ testimonies there was a constant need to translate even poetic verse into English, because ‘native’ words could not be trusted to convey the correct meaning unless they were placed in soothing parentheses next to their English equivalent. The product of this paternal need to record soldiers’ speech will be analysed below. It made possible the prospect of mistranslation and misinterpretation, of censors not being linguistically able enough to transcribe and translate Indian vernaculars, and missing the intended sentiment of the author, even if they were. The collated letters were not simply products of an uncritical acceptance of the ‘paternalism of the colonial state’Footnote 9 by soldiers, as Rajit Mazumder and David Omissi have argued—‘full of praise for the benevolent government, and exhortations to the men to fight bravely for the king’Footnote 10 and affirmations of colonial truths of shame/honour, caste/religion, and duty towards the sarkar.Footnote 11 The letters were rather marked by indeterminacy. They were and remain full of grey areas between author and censor, product and intention; of sipahis manipulating their speech out of an awareness that it was being misconstrued.
The missive from Medina emerged from this indeterminate, liminal terrain. It came to be termed the ‘Snowball’ letterFootnote 12 because it helped to frame a debate that Muslim soldiers conducted over their religion, and the frequency with which it was referred to increased as the War raged on. At the time, Tweedy, as chief censor, busied himself with trying to find where the letter had originated in (what proved to be a vain) hope that it could be stopped at the source. For the purposes of this paper, however, the precise origins of the missive are unimportant. As it was read, received, and transmitted by soldiers it was internalized and altered to reflect their own realities. Vernacular words and concepts such as ‘lakhs’ and ‘caste’ infiltrated the religious prose; the words and metaphors of the missive changed each time a soldier transcribed it or quoted from it; and the actions it inspired included everything from increased numbers fasting during Ramzan to outright mutiny. Furthermore, the letter came to be used as a response to, and operated in a space created by, Muslim reform movements in South Asia and earlier attempts to interfere with the religious practices of Muslim sipahis that were sanctioned by British and German military authorities. So rather than seeking to locate who first threw the ‘Snowball’, I will attempt to follow the path it took as it journeyed and grew in size.
The paper will begin with a brief account of German propaganda and the Ahmadiyya Movement before and during the First World War. It will recount their attempts to influence religious discourses among Muslim soldiers and the unintended consequences this activity had of spurring Muslim sipahis into questioning the compatibility of faith and military service. This will be followed by an analysis of the part the Snowball letter played in this reappraisal of how soldiers understood their religion. Finally, the paper will conclude by showing how this occurred with reference to two particular issues: interracial sex and the Turkish entry into the First World War.
Circulating the words of the Prophet(s): chain letters, German propaganda, and Ahmadi missionaries
The ‘Snowball’ letter was not the first of its type. In the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Jonathan G. Katz has discovered a series of eighteenth and nineteenth century accounts written in different scripts and locales, all of which invoked Sheikh Ahmad's dream:
Praise be to God, He alone. In the name of God the Merciful the Munificent, May God bless our lord and prophet and master Muhammad and his family and companions, and may He grant continued peace unto the Day of Judgment. It is told of Shaykh Ahmad, trustee (wakil) of the precinct of the Prophet (God bless him and grant him salvation!) that he said, ‘I was stationed in the Prophet's mihrab on the right side of his noble tomb Friday night reciting the word of God (May He be honored and glorified) when a man approached me. Light issued from his eyes in the middle of the night. I did not know what to think. Then I understood that this beauty belonged to our intercessor, our lord Muhammad (God bless him and grant him salvation!).
‘He said to me, “O Shaykh Ahmad, you know the condition of my community as to its good and its bad and what issues forth from my community.”
‘And when I saw this beauty I stopped and clasped my hands.
‘Then he said (God bless him and grant him salvation!), “You are sinners. Indeed, I have seen at this time 70,000 of whom 700 are in accordance with the faith and the remainder not in accordance with the faith. We take refuge in God from this evil, O Shaykh Ahmad.”
‘Then he said (God bless him and grant him salvation!), “I am ashamed before God Almighty and the angels because the people of my community disobey their mothers and fathers, and they do not recognize the condition of the poor and the unfortunate. Indeed, they study worldly desire. Do not the ’ulama have good-ness that no one listens to their speech or honors them? [sic] The wine session and the distraction of slander is preferable in their opinion to the session devoted to knowledge, hadith and dhikr. We have already sent to them prior to this two messages, and they did not pay attention to the matter, and not one among them saw it. I, God's servant, am ashamed before God Almighty and before the angels, while they neither have shame before God nor before us nor before the angels. While their faces bear the marks of faith, they have reviled the faithful.”
‘He said, “The khatib approached me and said to me, ‘Your community fears neither sins nor disobedience. They recite the book of God the Great. O Muhammad, your community commits these sins and they turn their faces. It is your nature, O my beloved, O Muhammad, (to show) mercy upon the believers.’”
‘Then the Prophet (God bless him and grant him salvation!) said to me: “Supply them this paper, O Shaykh Ahmad, God's deposition with you. Propagate this message to my people lest they abandon the faith: Obey God and the Prophet. Perhaps you will be granted mercy. Only (note that) the thing is near. Remorse has no benefit after death. Only (note that) the Resurrection is near. On account of the door of repentance being open, repent unto God of (your) sins. You and your faces are the faces of believers but your actions are the actions of Christians and Jews, and you will die not according to the faith. We seek God's protection from this evil. Only (note that) the accounting is near. The deed came to pass upon your heads before (the years) 1220 and 1230 [1805–1824 CE]. In the year forty the corruption will be great and death will be great in the year fifty. Cities will be destroyed in their entirety and signs will appear. In the year sixty stones will be hurled from the sky on the heads of sinners. In the year seventy the sun will rise in the west, and in the year eighty the word of God the Great will ring out and afterwards the Antichrist [al- Dajjal] will set forth.”’Footnote 13
The letters, posters, and telegrams are, for Katz, proof that ‘a pious Muslim of the eighteenth or nineteenth century’ could ‘express concern over the moral and spiritual health of the Islamic community for its own sake and without any explicit reference to the existence of the “Other” or the “West”’.Footnote 14 What may be true of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries was not true of the twentieth. The later version of the missive was conditioned by the site of its production, and shaped by the circulation of German and Ahmadiyya propaganda among Muslim sipahis.
Shortly after the start of hostilities and the appearance of Indian soldiers in France, the Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient (Intelligence Office for the Orient) was established in Germany. Its goal, as outlined by Max Freiherr von Opponheim, was to disseminate propaganda among colonial soldiers of the French, Russian, and British armies. Special newspapers were produced, provisions for religious worship were met, and leaflets written in ‘Oriental’ languages were prepared:Footnote 15
[. . .] You have been deceived. You are meant to fight here, on foreign soil for the British who hold your home country in bondage. But you do not know that at this moment the people of your country have risen against the English to win their freedom. This is confirmed by reliable news and telegrams from your native country. The English hide this information from you [. . .] But, men of India! The Germans do not want to kill you with their terrible weapons. They love your country and are well-disposed towards you [. . .] Although you cannot participate in the freedom fight of your brothers being as you are in a foreign country, you can help them by not fighting for their enemies here. Throw down your weapons and give yourselves up to the Germans!Footnote 16
At least some of this material originated from diasporic networks of revolutionary Indian nationalists in Europe and North America. Pamphlets and newspapers were being exchanged between the headquarters of Ghadar in San Francisco—an organization that was largely Punjabi and included a significant number of pensioned sipahis in its ranks—and the German Consulate in the city from the end of 1914 and beginning of 1915.Footnote 17 It is difficult to assess how successful this propaganda was among soldiers at the Front. No soldiers wrote of having seen such leaflets—and nor would they since it was a crime to secrete away and read enemy propaganda. It was also extremely difficult for British censors to intercept material thrown from one trench to another or dropped by aircraft. One letter from an Indian prisoner-of-war held in Germany in August 1915 was found and censored, but it was only discovered because it was posted to India by mistake.Footnote 18
Although it is hard to discern quite how much German propaganda made its way through to sipahis, its effect is not. It could spark off rumours, speculation, flights of fancy that had an effect greater than the number of soldiers reading it. The case of Jemadar Mir Dast of 58th Vaughan's Rifles is a prime example. Mir Dast defected to the Germans in February 1915 with 12 other sipahis. The fact that his brother had won the Victoria CrossFootnote 19 led some sipahis, particularly fellow Afridi Pathans, to speculate that Dast had been awarded the Iron Cross by Kaiser Wilhelm II.Footnote 20 That in turn led to the belief that the German Kaiser had subsequently converted to Islam:
A letter has come from those of our men whom the Germans took prisoner, from the men of our regiment, saying, ‘We are now under the German king. You can please yourselves. We are well and happy, because here there is a Muslim King.’ About 200 of our regiment were taken prisoner.Footnote 21
And it led to suggestions, by October 1915, that the Germans were preparing to liberate Muslims in India by invading through Afghanistan:
I have heard that an army of the Sultan Badshah and of the Germans has come to Kabul and I have heard that it numbers 11 lakhs of men and with it Jemadar Mir Dast too has come [. . .].Footnote 22
This rumour at least was not completely without foundation. By the end of 1915 Kabul had become a significant hub for South Asian anti-colonial and pan-Islamist activity. The group in Kabul included a number of overlapping and competing interests: students who had emigrated to Afghanistan in the hope of taking up arms under the Turkish Khilafa, representatives of the radical ulama at Deoband, and an official German-Turkish mission led by the former-Ghadari Maulana Barkatullah and Raja Mahendra Pratap.Footnote 23
It was while these conversations were ongoing that the first Ahmadiyya literature appeared and was passed on to soldiers without any censure or much comment. The Ahmadiyya Movement and its adherents were a small minority among South Asian Muslims but had an influence greater than their size. It was founded in 1889 by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as part of an explosion of public religious discourse in late nineteenth century Punjab, and of pamphlet wars and verbal jousting between Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim revivalist groups. Ghulam Ahmad's English-language journal, The Review of Religions, published from 1902 until his death in 1908, was full of articles issued in direct response to Arya Samaji critics of Islam (the issue of March/April 1903 for example),Footnote 24 critiquing Sikh religious reformers of the Lahore Singh Sabha and the Chief Khalsa Diwan (‘The Discovery of the Chola of Nanak’),Footnote 25 or as part of ongoing debates with more orthodox Islamic scholars. Iqbal Singh Sevea has described Ghulam Ahmad's activity as ‘a print jihad’ and as an extension into print of the public religious debates (munazara) taking place in the streets of Punjab and northern India:Footnote 26
[. . .] ours is the age of publicity and propaganda and now Islam will come to its own not through military conquest but by conquering the hearts and minds of men, with its beautiful teaching. [. . .] Islam's greatest need and opportunity lies in the diffusion and dissemination of its message which possesses a far greater striking power than any sword, gun or bomb.Footnote 27
Following Ghulam Ahmad's death in 1908 and a dispute over his legacy (the largest group, the Qadian faction or Jamaat-i-Ahmadiyya, claimed that Ghulam Ahmad was a continuation in the line of the prophets and not just a mujtahid or renewer of Islam), the Ahmadiyya Movement spread beyond the geographical contours of Punjab. By 1916, the Qadian faction had established missions in Britain—at Woking, Surrey, and at Great Russell Street in London—and from there sought to spread propaganda among the Muslim soldiery of the Indian Army in France. Ahmadiyya propaganda among soldiers was probably not the result of formal and open collusion with colonial military authorities. The Movement had always adopted an uncontroversial position over the nature of British rule. Ghulam Ahmad made repeated pronouncements that the British government had been a boon to the Muslims of India and had acted to preserve Islam.Footnote 28 As a consequence, Ahmadiyya had come to be widely celebrated in the pro-British Indian press during the early months of the First World War as ‘a sort of Protestant Muhammadanism’Footnote 29 and in evangelical literature for their ‘absence of political controversy’.Footnote 30 It is likely that the reason why Ahmadiyya propaganda was allowed to pass uncensored to Muslim sipahis was because it was counted as one of many loyalist voices that the Indian Army wanted its soldiers to hear (alongside regular visits by former officers, colonial officials, and Indian royalty).Footnote 31
The form that Ahmadiyya propaganda took in the trenches was not through the circulation of printed texts, which was the method of transmission of Ahmadiyya teachings in the post-war period. Large packages were difficult to send to sipahis on active service, and the types of trench literacy that permitted the writing of letters through the use of shared metaphor and imagery would have made the formalized prose of the English-language Muslim India and Islamic Review difficult to comprehend. The forms that it took among soldiers were either handwritten digests of printed material or convoluted arguments and instructions to individuals deemed to be receptive to the Ahmadiyya message in order that they could pass it on by word of mouth. This allowed for the Ahmadiyya message to be tailored to reflect major happenings in the War or act as rebuttals to certain rumours engendered by German propaganda. It also made the letters a running series of proofs that Ghulam Ahmad's prophecies were coming true and that the British Raj would endure. After the February Revolution in Russia in 1917, for instance, a summary of a pamphlet, which contained ‘proof’ that Ghulam Ahmad had predicted the event and stated that the sudden fall in grace of the tsar was a sign that British rule over India had been ordained by God, was sent to sub-assistant surgeon, Raffi-ud-din Khan:
He [Maulvi Mahomed Ali Khan—a prominent Ahmadi] remarks that before the war the Tzar of Russia was the most powerful King on Earth, since his word was law over 16 million people, and yet today, he asks what is the position of the Tzar? And he answers his question by saying that he has not only lost his crown and is a prisoner in the hands of people who before were as nothing in his estimation, but he is separated from his wife and family and his last state is one of utter ruin.
He observes that it is due to the blessing of God, that though the Tzar has been deprived of his ‘Crown’ no harm has come to our Government, which [is] prosecuting the war successfully.Footnote 32
This desire to demonstrate to sipahis that it was their religious duty to show fealty to the British crown was put in more frank language to the few soldiers who were Ahmadis and who had been spreading the word to their peers:
Subscriptions are being sent regularly to Kadiani Sharif. Mufta Mohamed Sadiq and Kazi Abdulla and Abdul Hali, Arab [sic], are having a good propaganda in London and English people, men and women, are becoming their disciples. We are being very successful. The prophecies of the Messiah are being fulfilled daily. The Mohamedans who are ignorant of our religion remain unsatisfied and suffer in pain. His Highness and the Prophet laid down that non-Musalmans who were our friends should be helped and supported and . . . [we should fight] against their enemies. The English Government is our supporter and protector and this Government is for us Indian Mohamedans, a blessing and a benefit. This is the Government under which we can follow our religion, and this Kingdom of England, especially London the capital, has a favourable atmosphere for Islam. There is no hindrance to our propaganda. It is our duty to fight for such a power and combat its enemies.Footnote 33
The reception the Ahmadiyya message by soldiers was, however, decidedly lukewarm. In the 18th Lancers, open scorn was shown for the Ahmadiyya Movement and the specific pamphlets and letters that were circulated within the regiment. Abusive correspondence was directed to Ahmadiyya missionaries from regimental lines, which accused them of being ‘false Musalmans’ for eating meat killed by non-Muslim butchers.Footnote 34 On other occasions Ahmadis were accused of being secret ChristiansFootnote 35 and gleeful tales were relayed of Ahmadiyya literature being burned in the trenches.Footnote 36 The response was so hostile within the 18th Lancers that the one Ahmadi within the troop, Dafadar Haq Nawaz, who had been the conduit through which Ahmadiyya propaganda was passed to others, suffered a change of heart. The reason, he explained, was because he had been influenced by men within the regiment who had issued counter-arguments to those put forward by the Ahmadis:
[. . .] I have seen, that the condition of all the Mohamedans is precisely what you have described on reference to this text. I do not contend with them; but when I listen to their talk, I am moved to utter a prayer ‘May God put them on the right way.’ On the surface they are faithful but in their hearts there is emptiness [. . .] I get full of burning wrath when I hear the complaint of my companions that our death [in the Army] has become unlawful.
PS. There is a matter on which I desire to consult you. Kindly give me your advice. The meaning of the text is ‘To obey God, to obey His Prophet and to obey the Authority placed over you.’ Now God is holy and the Prophet also is holy, should not the Authority placed over us also be holy? That is to say, one must follow in the footstep of the Prophet, and act in accordance with the example he has set, [but] must one also walk in the footsteps and act in accordance with the example placed over us? Must one in fact conform to the religion of our present King? These are the questions which a Shiah Moulvi in the regiment has raised after reading your tract, saying ‘We cannot accept [it] as the Authority mentioned in the text, [is] an Authority which eats swine's flesh, drinks spirits and commits fornication.’ They [Muslim soldiers] admit that they are greatly in error saying ‘We do not serve the Authority from our hearts; but on the surface we show more than obedience. So without doubt we greatly err.’ For myself, since this discussion was started, I find myself unable literally to follow in the footsteps of the Authority [. . .] If the precepts of the Prophet are the precepts of God and the precepts of the Authority are to be regarded in the same way as the precepts of the Prophet, then they say the precepts of the Authority should be pure.Footnote 37
For other soldiers it was not enough to merely counter the Ahmadiyya message, but necessary to find genuine alternatives to what the Ahmadis preached. This took the form of personal letters to pirs or maulvis in India asking their advice or religious instruction: ‘Is it lawful for Mohamedans to take milk from the cow by the hands of Christians?’;Footnote 38 ‘Have we sinned for not keeping the Ramzan fast?’;Footnote 39 ‘Has God abandoned us for fighting in this War?’Footnote 40 Another approach was to take an interest in prominent Muslims involved in the nascent nationalist movement in India. Lance Dafadar Sher Mohamed of 38th Central India Horse wrote to the editor of Khabit—a Muslim newspaper published in Delhi at the time—demanding that he send his regiment all the news he had on Moulana Abul Kalam Azad because ‘I know his writing and as I am a devout Mohamedan I have a great affection for him.’Footnote 41Sipahi Mohamed Yousuf wished to see the proceedings of the All-India Muslim League after they agreed to share a joint platform with Congress in 1916,Footnote 42 and his peers avidly discussed Edwin Montague's tour of India in the following year.Footnote 43 Thus, while German propaganda and Ahmadiyya missionary activity certainly did have an effect on Muslim soldiers of the Indian Army in the First World War, it did not have the intended effect. Rumours circulated of German veneration for Islam and that the Kaiser was preparing to invade India, but it never resulted in anything resembling Sir Roger Casement's German-backed ‘Irish Brigade’, despite the best efforts of the Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient.Footnote 44 Ahmadiyya literature and sermons won few adherents and spurred soldiers to investigate other competing religious and politicized voices within Islam. But both German and Ahmadiyya propaganda contributed to a climate that allowed for Shaikh Ahmad's dream to be revived and reinvested with contemporary meaning for Muslim South Asian soldiers.
Shaping snowballs in France: (re)reading and (re)writing the Snowball letter
The Snowball letter emerged as part of the conversation about their religion in which Muslim sipahis were engaged. It was a document shaped and informed by pre-existing discourses, cultures, and traditions of the soldiering Muslim in South Asia— the ‘religious world of the sepoy’ as Nile Green puts it in his study of faqirs in the cantonments of colonial Hyderabad.Footnote 45 The religious practices of Muslim sipahis were the sites of sustained, if not systemic, attempts to rationalize Islam by both Protestant evangelicals disturbed by the presence of perverted rituals and ganja-consuming holy menFootnote 46 and the only slightly less forgiving attitudes of Muslim religious reformers in South Asia. They were to be a conduit through which rationalizing, reforming visions were to be projected into the closed space of Indian home and hearth. At the same time, however, they became the conduit through which the rural world of miracles, saints, and dreams from the Prophet could re-enter the cantonment and trench. The Army could act as catalyst for the transregional and transnational expansion of cults around particular Sufi saints,Footnote 47 and for stories transmitted as a battalion moved from one cantonment to another or as soldiers congregated in the ‘back areas’ in France during reprieves from active service. The Snowball letter reflected and furthered the ability of Muslim sipahis to act as religious conduits and catalysts.
It was no accident that the version of the Snowball letter that was first intercepted and recorded in full was sent by Sipahi Gasthip Khan, a Punjabi Muslim soldier serving in France. Punjabi Muslims were both the largest representation of the ‘martial races’ in the Indian Army in the years before the First World War and formed the highest proportion of Indian Army combatants recruited during the conflict (136,126 out of a total of 657,739).Footnote 48 Aspects of the Snowball letter took on a textual counterpart to munazara—public religious debates within Islam and between Muslims and other religious figures that were initially linked to Mughal courts at Fatehpur Sikri and Lahore, and which received a new, more popular, impetus from the early nineteenth century on in response to Christian missionaries and religious reform movements.Footnote 49 By the late nineteenth century, printed pamphlets and tracts became a new means for the dissemination of these verbal debates by Deobandis and Arya Samajis, Singh Sabhites, and Ahmadiyya. Each publication was a means of advancing a particular name and cause, demonstrating the extent of one's religious and cultural learning and deriving authority and status from that fact. Mughal decline and British imperial rule necessitated the broadening of the social, cultural, and intellectual space of munazara for North Indian Muslims, but, as Justin Jones has shown in his study of Amroha, it still remained a forum for a learned religious elite and the reified reliving of a lost Mughal past.Footnote 50 The Snowball letter was a sub-textual counterpart to soldiers’ own munazara, dependent on metaphor, myth, and devotional Islam. The version transcribed by Gasthip Khan contained obvious allusions to the Ahmadiyya message and the letter was used to offer a retort to Ahmadi Muslims by Gasthip or one of his predecessors in the chain of the letter's transmission. The Snowball contained an inbuilt authority through its dream symbology of the Prophet's message, the imminent Day of Judgement, and the eponymous figure of Sheikh Ahmad. It was influenced by a Sufi and pre-Islamic Arab tradition of revelation coming through the form of a dream sequence, of the dream acting as a conduit between direct human experience and the spiritual world (alam al-Jabarut) that would reveal truth and meaning without the need for formal tuition. The letter shared the register in which the Ahmadiyya message was packaged to soldiers—‘Those who were wont to sleep in linen white as the jessamine flower will in the morning find themselves sprinkled with blood like the plane tree’Footnote 51—along with the prognosis that most Muslims would be found wanting by God during the imminent Day of Judgement.Footnote 52 But, in the Snowball letter, or at least Gasthip's version of it, the reason why Muslims had angered Allah and the Prophet was because they had deviated from the ‘original type of Mahomedans’ and had dared to listen to supposed heretical beliefs.Footnote 53 It warned that the ‘followers of Mohamet’ have become ‘Kafirs’, and the kind of apostates they had become was made clear when the vices of these ‘false Muslims’ were listed.Footnote 54 The sins of eating ‘swine's flesh’, ‘backbiting’ by attacking fellow Muslims, and misappropriating ‘other's property’ were vices that soldiers had already levelled at Ahmadi Muslims and in language that was only slightly more intemperate than in the munazaras of Punjab.Footnote 55
Yet the Snowball letter was never just a document produced by Punjabis or a response to religious reformers from Punjab. Sipahis in the Indian Army were transregional and transnational itinerants. Before the First World War individual sipahis could expect to experience service on the Afghan frontier, in Malaya and the Far East, and circulate between several dozen large cantonments in India. The imperial reach of the First World War allowed the soldiering bodies of the Indian Army to be transnationalized further. Sipahis based in Malaya at the advent of the First World War were shipped to Marseilles through the Suez Canal, diverted to fight in Mesopotamia and Palestine or sent to Zanzibar for expeditions into German East Africa. Muslims in the Indian Army experienced the pan-Indian and global reach of Islam during the First World War and, due to exigencies of the conflict, shared an intimate physicality on board ship or in a trench with other Muslim ‘martial classes’. Punjabi Muslims were the largest of the martial races recruited into the Indian Army during the First World War, but the definitions of martialness in India were malleable enough to extend to Pathans on the Frontier; rural Muslim communities deemed to be descended from Pathans or Rajputs in the Indo-Gangetic plain, Rajputana, and Central India; and ‘Dekhani Mussalmans’ recruited from Hyderabad. As much as 13 per cent of all the combatants recruited into the Indian Army during the First World War were non-Punjabi Muslims (86,552 out of 657,739),Footnote 56 and an even larger proportion were recruited into technical and ancillary units. Furthermore, although Gasthip Khan's version of Snowball of 4 July 1916 was the first to be transcribed by the censor, the letter was known about and was being discussed by soldiers in non-Punjabi units at least a year earlier. On 23 August 1915 Havildar Umr-al-Din Khan, an Orakzai Pathan, forwarded on a version of Snowball that had been handed to him by ‘those of the Faith’ working at ‘the telegraph offices’, but the censor, deeming the telegram to have little importance, failed to record its contents.Footnote 57 In May 1916, Abdul Alim, a Hindustani Musalman Signaller, confided that he heard the message read out by members of his Signal Troop and proceeded to offer his own interpretation of what it meant:
Habibullah then told Battye Sahib this parcel of lies. . .[that] Ahmed Yar Khan (helped by Fazlali and Yar Khan of Troop No.2 and Yasim Khan and Abdushakim [sic]) read out an address in which he said that for a Mohamedan to fight against a Turk would be the mark of an infidel, and that all those killed in fighting against the Turks would not go to Paradise. This was all false for his lecture was really to the effect that the Mohamedans who drank wine and committed fornication and did other things forbidden by Islam would die the death of an unbeliever. He said that all who died after living such lives were lost and that it was therefore incumbent on all to go back to their good old-fashioned habits. Anyone who doubted this was a Kafir pure and simple. This was all contained in the letter which I saw and which had come from Mecca.Footnote 58
And, shortly after Gasthip's letter, Fyazuddin, a printer from Agra, shared the same version of Snowball in October 1916 with a Muslim Rajput soldier serving in the 38th Central India Horse in France.Footnote 59 The Snowball letter was circulated between intimate contacts in the Army and disparate spaces and communities at home and then back again. The significance of the Snowball letter came from its existence as a chain letter and the myriad interlocutors it passed through. The demand made at the end of the letter—that it was mandatory for any literate Muslim to ‘copy the message’, ‘circulate it from city to city’, and ‘read it out to others’—led to it being shaped to accord with the beliefs and understanding of the individual receiving and sharing the message. At the same time and in the same space, it allowed for an individual in the 38th Central India Horse to feel connected to a Punjabi Muslim soldier in another regiment, and together remark on the global reach of Islam: ‘It went to India, to the City of Delhi, and then in this fashion, moving from strength to strength among the people, and especially among those of the Faith by means of the Telegraph offices it has come here.’Footnote 60
The Snowball's simultaneous existence as authoritative dreamscape and malleable chain letter allowed it to be rewritten and repackaged each time it was read, written, and passed on, but still retain the register of Sheikh Ahmad's dream. The pliability of the letter is evident from the accounts soldiers gave of how they first heard the message and how they proceeded to share its contents. Havildar Umr-al-Din Khan wrote of how the message had reached his unit by telegraph, presumably from another source within the Indian Army, but his excitement stemmed from the fact ‘the paper’ had travelled from ‘Holy Medina. . .to India, to the City of Delhi’ before arriving in France.Footnote 61 Sowar Rahmat Khan, in December 1915, confessed that he had providentially stumbled upon a version of the letter lying on the floor of his hospital and was immediately going to send ‘three copies to Jandiala, one for the mosque and two for the brotherhood’.Footnote 62 It is unclear whether either Rahmat or Umr-al-Din Khan shared versions of Sheikh Ahmad's dream that were similar to that in the Snowball of July 1916. But their soldiering peers certainly did begin to appropriate the content and form of the message and invest it with different meanings. Dil Khan of the 129th Baluchis labelled himself a pir upon hearing of one version of the letter and merged half-correct quotes from the Snowball into the sermons that he gave to friends and family in France and in India. He was unsure precisely where the letter had originated from and misquoted the figures of those who had been saved and those who had been condemned, but the basic message of Snowball remained:
Perhaps this world is not for our people and the end is not for our people. You are a religious and prayerful man. . .so know that a letter has come from Mecca or Medina in which it says that all Musalmans have turned infidels through lust of this world, and the times are evil. They eat through the fast and do not pray and in two weeks 70000 thousand, you know, received forgiveness and 19 lakhs went to Hell. The moon rises in the West. [At] First it rose from the East . . . It is the beginning of death. The end is at hand. Since I was born I never heard the like of this letter that comes from Holy Mecca.Footnote 63
Abdul Ghani, a sipahi who had been wounded and had returned to Punjab, wrote to a soldier in France and quoted a fragment of the Snowball missive, in proto-Rushdean vein. He claimed that the words had not come from a letter at all but from the mouth of a woman in a nearby village who had been born from the womb of a cow and had been found sucking at its teat:
I have also heard that at Nambal a man's cow brought forth and gave birth to a woman. [. . .] he gave her clothing and in fear went to Maulvi Faqir-Ullah, and asked him what was this miracle. The Maulvi replied ‘If the woman can speak, go and ask her.’ So he came back and asked her and found her drinking the cow's milk. She said ‘I am born to make trial of you, for the Day of Judgement is at hand. The people do not say their prayers, nor [do they] keep the fast. They eat that which is unlawful and drink wine. They do evil deeds. Refrain from these things.’Footnote 64
Even when the Snowball letters were not being directly quoted from at all, the sentiments contained therein informed the everyday correspondence of sipahis. It was referenced when soldiers wrote home and asked their families to distribute zakat or alms on their behalf ‘for this is the last time’.Footnote 65 It was hinted at in letters written in the latter parts of the War in which sipahis discussed how and why they had been keeping the Ramzan fast in the trenches:
We are keeping a fast since 2nd July, and we have now completed 25 days. May God look kindly on our effort, Amen. I have had much discussion with Abdul Khalik Khan about the keeping of the fast. He said ‘Your people gain no credit by keeping the fast, since God has dispensed with us all, whereas you continue to fast.’ I replied ‘The life which we are now leading is one which God would not inflict even on a dog, as it is a time of unspeakable hardship with death always at hand, and perhaps by the grace of God we may gain heaven by reason of our self-denial in having kept the fast. Amen! If God in his mercy takes us safely home again, it will be time for us to enjoy ourselves [. . .]’ Tell me when you write whether our self-denial has obtained us credit with God or not.Footnote 66
Finally, the Snowball letters intruded upon pieces of prose lamenting the fallen state of contemporary Muslims, whether in India or in France:
Khan Sahib the fact of the matter is that we have given up God's law which he gave to us and we have thus been disgraced. The people of Europe have not followed this law in its entirety but have gone some way in that direction and hence the blessings which have been bestowed on them. How true is the saying of Syed Ahmad
‘The table of laws which we broke
The people of the west have joined.’
I have now seen this with my own eyes in Europe and understand why God is pleased with the Europeans. There are no doubt shameful things here among individuals, but if there were no blemishes of any kind they would all be angels, and they would have escaped the punishment which has fallen upon Europe. What can I say more, Khan Sahib? If God takes pity on us we may pull through but without his help I see no prospect of our becoming men at all! God has given us many things which Europe does not possess and if we only follow God's law, Europe will be as nothing beside us.Footnote 67
Thus the process of transliteration and interlocution of the Snowball letters allowed for parts to be emphasized over others, parts to be rewritten, and others to be ignored. It had a semantic legacy on subsequent correspondence, even when it was not being referred to directly or consciously. But the Snowball letters did not just shape the language and sentiments of subsequent correspondence. As will be shown in the rest of the paper, they helped to alter existing attitudes towards sex and the legitimacy of the War.
‘Could a man be so perverted to lose his religion for the sake of a woman?’: sex, intercourse, and religion in France
In the winter of 1916 and 1917, the Indian Army in France decided to sanction marriages between Muslim sipahis and French women. It was, officially, a favour to the French government which had requested that bars on interracial marriage, in this particular set of circumstances, be relaxed.Footnote 68 This occurred in the context of punitive measures taken elsewhere to stop sexual liaisons between Indian men and British women, because interracial sex of that sort would be ‘detrimental to the prestige and spirit of’ British ‘rule’.Footnote 69 French women suddenly became an acceptable focus for Indian (Muslim) sexual desire. The reaction from the sipahis concerned, however, was mixed. Their correspondence charts the descent from initial glee, to concerns that it was all a ruse to detain soldiers in the killing-fields of France or convert them to Christianity, then to an eventual push for sexual abstinence. Sipahis began to mirror their superiors’ horror at what the racial mixing of bodies would mean for their own religious identities.
During the First and Second World Wars, black servicemen in Europe were subjected to a troubling mixture of desire, envy, and revulsion. As Richard Smith has argued, the broadening of recruiting practices in Britain beyond regular soldiers and reservists in 1915 brought about a crisis of white masculinity. It arose amid the sudden prevalence of ‘shell-shock’, the constant necessity to relax requirements for military service because of the poor health and stature of British men,Footnote 70 and a well-established eugenics movement that warned of racial degeneration.Footnote 71 Colonial troops offered a striking contrast, whether ‘magnificently proportioned’ Caribbean soldiers,Footnote 72 Black GIs—‘Honey you should see how the “old women” like to go around with negroes here. Perhaps they like to go around with them because they have immense Penises’Footnote 73—or the ‘beautiful’ men of India:
They have masses of long, fine, dark hair under their turbans done up with yellow combs, glorious teeth, and melting dark eyes [. . .] The younger boys have beautiful, classic Italian faces, and the rest have fierce black beards curling over their ears.Footnote 74
The colonized body became the site of sexual fantasy and consensual sex. But in both conflicts, this was not without its consequences. Prosecutions and less formalized violence against Black American soldiers was the subject of Graham Smith's seminal work When Jim Crow Met John Bull; Richard Smith has documented some of the racist attacks on interracial couples that occurred in London and elsewhere between 1917 and 1919;Footnote 75 and the BBC recently produced a television series examining the official horror in Britain at the presence of the ‘half-caste’ child in its port-cities.Footnote 76 Indian sipahis also shared in this tale of sexual success and official frustration.
In the case of Indian soldiers, British military authorities took pre-emptive action to try to segregate Indian men from white women. British nurses were barred from attending to Indian military wounded, with the exception of the Lady Hardinge Hospital at Brockenhurst in Hampshire, which was the only hospital for the treatment of Indian wounded that was funded by a private charity (the Indian Soldiers’ Fund), and a handful of female nurses who served in field hospitals in France. In the hospitals established in Britain by the Indian Medical Service (the medical wing of the colonial Indian Army) the ‘sex problem’ necessitated further precautions. At the largest hospital—the Kitchener Indian Hospital in Brighton, established in the former Brighton Workhouse—Indian personnel were prohibited from leaving hospital grounds except under armed guard, their rations were reduced in the belief that it would limit their sexual stamina, and ‘cases of “breaking out”’ beyond hospital grounds were punished with a ‘dozen lashes’.Footnote 77
In spite of these efforts to limit contact, encounters between European women and Indian men were common. A large number of soldiers’ letters referred to European mems of all backgrounds. Wealthy French spinsters and widowers were portrayed as desperate to secure the ‘carnal pleasure’ of sipahis—Sikhs and men of the Service Corps could apparently earn as much as ‘6, 7 or 8 francs’ a timeFootnote 78—or as matronly figures showing motherly concern:
My mother, like you this French mother does all she can for my comfort and thinks much of me [. . .] At the time when I was away and could not find time to write either to you or her she came close to the place where I was and where no one is permitted to come, and asked to see her boy, and brought with her a hamper of things to eat. What more can I say about the concern she has for my welfare?Footnote 79
Sex-workers were written about voluminously. Jai Singh relayed at length his intention to journey into the ‘fairylands’ of Paris and his plan to spend ‘Rs. 250 in four days’,Footnote 80 and others commented on the easy sexual gratification available outside their hospital grounds or on the streets of English towns:
English girls are very free in their nature and they love Indians very much [. . .] Love-making and breathing in Europe is nothing but a matter of choice, friends are plenty when purse is full.Footnote 81
Europe was the site of phantasmagoria and sexual transgression for the colonial soldier. But even before marriages between Muslim Indian sipahis and French women were sanctioned in October 1916, opportunistic sexual encounters had developed into more enduring, consensual relationships. Many sipahis talked of leaving the Army and going in search of other work in France in order to settle down with their ‘Mademoiselle’,Footnote 82 and defended the women who had captured their hearts from claims that they were sex-workers or were otherwise ‘morally impure’:
Whatever you have written about Bernadette is entirely false. She is an unmarried girl and surrounded by modesty and moreover, I rely on her, and she has given me her youthful promise that she will never look at another man. Further my actual seal remains imprinted upon her.Footnote 83
Finally, some non-Muslim sipahis appeared to have actively considered converting to Islam or Christianity so that they could marry in France, in spite of the unease it provoked among their parents:
Consider, how could I possibly consent to your becoming a Musalman and marrying a Moslem wife, or embracing Christianity and marrying a Christian wife? Have you no shame? Do you think I brought you up so that you might marry a Christian wife? Could a man be so perverted to lose his religion for the sake of a woman? [. . .] Now I give you my last advice, viz. to put away this unprofitable idea from your mind, and never to allude to it in future. And if you reject my advice, take care how you bring such a woman to my house, for she will be beaten on the head with a shovel a thousand times [. . .]Footnote 84
Thus both Muslim and non-Muslim soldiers, if not their families in India, were fairly open to interracial sex, sexual experimentation, and even marriage—at least in the first few years of their time in France.
There was a marked change in tone in sipahis’ correspondence on the issue by the end of 1916 and the beginning of 1917. Suddenly and unexpectedly the issue of interracial sex leading to interracial marriage became an issue of faith, but only among Muslims. In August 1916, the supposedly lax sexual mores of Muslims began to be seen as a reason for God turning his back on the followers of Islam:
The holy festival of Ed was celebrated here by the Egyptians in a very strange way [. . .] The festival lasted from 1st to 3rd August [sic] [. . .] During these 3 days we did not meet a single Egyptian who was not the reverse of virtuous and well conducted. Each man encountered was more or less the worse for drink, and having at least one ‘nightingale’ sitting beside him in his carriage indulged in all kinds of lewd and obscure songs. It was all very wrong [. . .] The part of the town occupied by Courtesans was worth seeing. On one side a ‘nightingale’ in the possession of an Arab sang loudly. On the other a ‘nightingale’ embraced an Egyptian, while some poor Hindustani looked on and wondered when his turn would come [. . .] Great Kazis [Judges] and Muftis [Law-givers] and Devotees, who had rigorously kept the fast for a month, merely awaited their opportunity at the approach of evening to carry away their ‘nightingales’ and despoil them in the dark. It was a strange sight watching the flittings in and out, here and there, of the ‘rose-faced’ ones. Shame! Shame! The very ground cried out for protection, and praying to God said ‘for a day like this make a new earth for I am no longer able to endure the suggestive gait and the thrust of the painted heels of these creatures.’Footnote 85
In November 1916, coded letters emerged that were sent to individuals who were known to have had relationships with French women which accused them of adopting the garb and customs of European men in an attempt to become ‘Misters’ or ‘Gentlemen’.Footnote 86
Alongside me a Bulbul [a type of songbird] is lying. I had intended putting her in this envelope and sending her to you. But I realise that you have no desire for an Indian Bulbul. Tell me, have you a Bulbul [in France] or not? You surely must have one ‘Mister’! Do you understand what I mean?Footnote 87
In case these warnings were too oblique, in 1917 these letters metamorphosed into threats of harsh repercussions for any individuals found to be taking ‘cups of tea in hotels’ (visiting brothels) or who were engaged to French women—both were seen as the first steps to an individual abandoning his faith and ‘becoming a Christian’.Footnote 88 The nature of these repercussions became apparent in the 38th Central India Horse where in October 1917 Ajab Khan wrote of the social ostracization that met soldiers who were found to have venereal disease:
If I had not done my best to advise and restrain Wazir Zada Khan his condition would have been disastrous. As soon as he reached Marseilles he contracted venereal disease. The same thing happened when he went to Rouen. In the Sircar's house if anyone commits murder he gets punished and the matter is finished; but if a man gets venereal disease each and everyone perpetually looks askance at him.Footnote 89
The result of Muslim soldiers ‘looking askance’ at other sipahis who had pursued relationships with French women can be seen in the 6th Cavalry. Several sowars in that squadron appeared to have married Frenchwomen, and a significant number of those had had children with their wives. By the end of 1917, however, not one of those sowars claimed to be content with married life. Lance Dafadar Mohamed Khan began his first letters after his wedding by defending his decision to marry a Frenchwomen and refuting allegations that he intended to stay on in Europe and convert to Christianity:
You seem to have made up your mind that Mohamed Khan will never return to India. This is an absolute error. Do you suppose that because a man has married he cannot come back? [. . .] I made the girl a Mohamedan before I married her. Why are you so displeased? If my wife likes to go to India well and good. If not she can stay in France. I will not stay here and nor did I ever promise to do so [. . .] Do not imagine that because I married a European I have become a Christian, never!Footnote 90
After he was stripped of his ‘stripe’ at the insistence of the men under his command in June 1917, he wrote letters claiming that he had been forced into the wedding through no fault of his own:
I want to tell you of my misfortunes. I was stationed in a village and was in a house where they were very kind to me. There was a young woman in the house and the parents were very pleased with me. She wrote to the King in London and asked permission for me to marry her and the petition came back with the King's signature on it granting leave. But she did all this without my knowledge. The Colonel sent for me and asked whether it was true. I said it was and asked his leave to marry but said I must make the girl a Mohamedan. The Colonel and the men then got very angry and took away my rank of Lance Dafadar and said they would not give me leave to get married. When this came to the girl's ears she sent another petition to the King and the Colonel gave leave and said that directly [after] the marriage was celebrated he should be informed. According to His Majesty's order the wedding came off on the 2nd April [. . .] But I swear to God I did not want to marry but after the King's order I should have got into grave trouble if I had refused.Footnote 91
Finally, after being flooded with letters from as far afield as Calcutta which accused him of being an apostate, Sowar Mohamed Khan begged forgiveness for the ‘sin’ he had committed and cursed his own child for being the daughter of a ‘Kafir’:
I have wept much since Kariz Fatima's illness. What you have written that Margaret is my daughter now and that I don't care about Kariz Fatima at all, is wholly false. Kariz is part of my heart and Margaret is the daughter of a Kafir from whose hands it is unlawful even to drink water.Footnote 92
It is impossible to know exactly how many troopers in the 6th Cavalry had had contact with Sheikh Ahmed's dream. There is no direct evidence that the Snowball letter was sent to any member of the troop. The search for bodily purity was certainly influenced by individual experiences of the horrors of trench-warfare and an internalization of institutional concern for what sexual contact might mean for white prestige, yet interracial sex only became a problem for Muslim sipahis of the Indian Army. Sikhs and the various caste Hindu soldiers recruited as Rajputs, Dogras, and Jats were still writing voluminously of the ‘fairylands’ of Paris, even as soldiers in the 6th Cavalry were being socially ostracized for not abandoning their French partners. Sex in France became an issue for Muslims just as the Snowball letter was being read and passed on in larger and larger numbers. And, although there is no direct evidence of its presence among the sipahis who suddenly became concerned by the issue of interracial sex from 1916, its signs and manners of speech were shared by those who took up the cause: ‘Shame! Shame! The very ground cried out for protection, and praying to God said “for a day like this make a new earth for I am no longer able to endure the suggestive gait and the thrust of the painted heels of these creatures”.’Footnote 93
‘Show the frenzy of Islam in the fight, oh Musalmans!’: Jazirat-al-Arab, 15th Lancers, and mutiny in Mesopotamia
On the 29 October 1914, the Ottoman empire entered into the hostilities against the Allied powers by shelling the Imperial Russian fleet at Odessa.Footnote 94 The timing of the act could not have been worse for the commanders of Indian divisions overseas and the India Office in Whitehall. Fears were raised that Indian Muslim sipahis would sympathize with their co-religionists, and instructions were given to the chief censor of Indian military correspondence in France to report any such instances that he came across. Remarkably little was found. Muslim sipahis began to discuss the TurkishFootnote 95 entry into the war in the early months of 1915, but the censor discovered only a handful of letters that appeared to express any dismay. Yet, when units containing Muslim sipahis were sent from France to fight against the Ottomans in Mesopotamia (Iraq), the 15th Lancers (or Cureton's Multanis) mutinied as soon as they disembarked. The mutiny, and the wider change in attitudes displayed by Muslim sipahis towards Turkey, was due the lexicological and semantic shifts that followed the path of the Snowball letter.
While in France as part of the 3rd Lahore Division,Footnote 96 and before the advent of the First World War, the 15th Lancers had an exemplary service record. The regiment was formed during the Uprisings of 1857 from six risallahs of ‘Multani Pathans’ by a Captain Cureton and continued to be an exclusively Punjabi Muslim cavalry unit recruited from the Multan area. After being sent to France, the regiment fought at the battles of Neuve Chapelle, Aubers, Festubert, Loos, La Bassee, Messines, Givenchy, and St Julien in 1914 and 1915, and did so, by all accounts, with some distinction. More importantly, the men in the regiment appeared to show scant regard for Turkey or its entry into the War:
What better occasion can I find than this to prove the loyalty of my family to the British Government? Turkey, it is true, is a Muhammedan power, but what has that got to do with us? Turkey is nothing at all to us.Footnote 97
In other words, the 15th Lancers had little history of dissent even when hunkered down in the trenches of the Western Front.
Despite these expressions and signs of loyal service, there was a simmering undercurrent in attitudes towards the Sarkar. By the summer of 1915, soldiers had begun to discuss Turkey's progress in the War using language that the censor could only partially decipher.Footnote 98 One means of doing so, identified by the censor, was to cast belligerents as fictional villagers or as animals and place them within poetic parables. Risaldar Zabida Khan used this method in 1915 to convey his dismay that the sultan and khalifa of Turkey had become involved in the conflict, before taking some small comfort at the fact that no confrontation had yet happened with Britain:
I am sorry about Talmand Khan [Turkey] but it is the will of God. God is gracious and you are praying. We will see what happen[s]. He has staked his head and his body but life is the thing most precious to everyone and he is sitting down and biding his time.Footnote 99
When the forces of the British empire were cast into battle against the Turks at Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia, Abbas Ali Khan of the 38th Central India Horse used the same metaphor to express his secret desire that ‘Sultan Khan’ would emerge victorious:
You are continually writing and saying that there is a conflict between Fateh Khan [Britain] and Sultan Khan [Turkey], and you ask me to pray that Fateh Khan may obtain the victory. I however am very concerned about Sultan Khan because he is an honest person whereas Fateh Khan is a great rascal, and dishonest. I pray for Sultan Khan, that he may obtain his rights.Footnote 100
And when in March 1917 the British captured Baghdad and routed the Turkish army, Sowar Gul Mohamed Khan used another parable to express his state of mind:
You asked me how the groves of the pomegranates and medlars [Arabia] are getting on. My reply is that the nightingales have looted the fruits of both groves and when they were plundered you were not there. It is a great pity.Footnote 101
Amid the letters that conveyed specific information about the progress of Turkey in the War were others that sought to link the decline of the Ottoman empire with the perceived decline of Islam. Each took the form of dream sequences or poems that mirrored elements of the Snowball letter, and each returned, time and time again, to the threats facing the Jazirat-al-Arab—the ‘island of the Arabs’ and the cradle of Islam. In one letter, the author of which is uncertain, the dream took the form of a Hajji entering a Hindu temple for ‘a sweet offering’, but when ‘he had received [it] once, he drew his hand back and put forward the other. A dog carried off the sweetmeats which were in his hand and from the other the vessel was turned aside.’Footnote 102 In another, Sowar Ajab Gul wrote of a Kafkaesque vision he had had of his father being killed by his brother after he had taken the form of a harmless insect:
I have had a dream and must tell you about [it]. My father appeared in the shape of a dried up insect and brother Hazara Gul drove him away and he fell on the ground. My mother said ‘you tyrant that was your father and you have killed him’. . . I then prayed that God would give me a glimpse of my father and I went to sleep again and had another dream and saw my father washing his teeth seated on a charpoy. I then woke up and prayed to God that if he were dead I might see him as he was and then fell asleep and saw my father in his grave in our own house. Then his hands and feet appeared and he came out of his tomb. I was delighted and said ‘Father are you all right?’ He replied, ‘No I am not.’ Then I saw a Mullah appear and my father and he began to read the Koran together. Then I put my father back in his tomb and directly afterwards the grave was illuminated and I woke up. I am disturbed in mind. What does it all mean?Footnote 103
Finally, constant inferences were made to the plight of Muslims across the world in poetic verse:Footnote 104
The ship of our country is in distress far from home
The day of resurrection has commenced behind the curtain of tyranny.
Confidents and sympathizers of your country
The wind that reaches you is laden with grief.
It says to you ‘We are far from home—keep us in remembrance.’
Those who are dying for their country, this is their cry,
‘Our blood proclaims our fidelity.’
The civilized world acknowledges their worth,
If their necks be bent at all it is a passing stage.
Alas, that in our hearts the flame of love has not been kindled!
The caravan of our country is grieving in a foreign land,
Tyrants are not shamed by their tyranny,
They ravage the plot, which one time bloomed with flowers.
Where formerly sweet melody reigned supreme
Is now heard the clinking of handcuffs.
To them, as travellers, all roads have been closed,
Fetters are bound on the innocent ones.
If in your heart there is not yet the spirit of modesty,
Read the funeral service of the honour of your race and faith.
[. . .]
Consider the love of Islam,
It gave to its deadly enemy the cup of death.
Now is the opportunity of your brother's honour!
The duty is a real one, not the price of generosity.
If now the heart of Islam turns to water,
A thousand pagan jeers will fall on Mohammedanism.
Show the frenzy of Islam in the fight, Oh Musalmans!
Otherwise the honour of your race will depart, Oh guardians of that honour!
Remember the race from which you sprang, show the might of your country!
Your country is oppressed with troubles, [so] recollect the obligations of your duty.
The Prophet has bequeathed to you his humanity and generosity
You are the living monuments of the sense of honour of the Arabs.Footnote 105
Thus the impact of Turkey's entry into the First World War can be measured through sipahis’ correspondence, but not in the manner that the censor imagined. There was little direct reference to the Ottoman empire or its military defeats, but the ‘dogs’ that troubled pious Muslims in the dreams that soldiers relayed, the ‘fathers’ who were accidentally killed by fellow soldiers, and the ‘tyranny’ that was troubling ‘our country’ are constant reminders of the sentiments engendered within many Muslim sipahis at the prospect of fighting their co-religionists.
In the 15th Lancers, these feelings reached their acme. The 3rd Indian Division, of which the 15th Lancers were part, was ordered to Mesopotamia in December 1915 after the first British campaign against Turkish forces in Arabia ended in failure. Dada Amir Haider Khan, then a lascar serving on board a troop transport ship, wrote in his memoirs of the voyage to Basra from France. He recalled that on board there ‘were nearly fifty men who had come from the area of my home’ of Rawalpindi, and they regularly relayed ‘the day-to-day information’ of the unease within the 15th Lancers:
As Muslims they believed it was a sin to fight against their co-religionists and an Indian officer, a non-commissioned Jemadar, took up the lead in inducing them to refuse orders to go to the front. For true Muslims, he said, it is better to disobey and even fight here and die for one's faith than to go to the front and fight against one's Islamic brothers and die as Kaffirs. [. . .] they must resist if the authorities tried to disarm them and fight to the end as an example to all Muslims stationed there. It would be more worthy than to die as Kaffirs.Footnote 106
It was an echo of the rhetoric of Snowball. ‘Maulvi’ Ghulam Sarvar, a trooper within the 15th Lancers, wrote a first-hand account of what occurred upon landing at Mesopotamia in January 1916. Every man within the regiment took an oath with ‘the Koran in his hand’Footnote 107 to make ‘some representation’ as they disembarked because Basra and Arabia were ‘held most sacred by Mussalmans’.Footnote 108 But the Indian officers betrayed their oaths and co-religionists by informing their British superiors:
The account of my misfortunes is a long one and I now proceed to relate it. We left France and voyaged for one month to Basrah. [sic] As soon as we arrived at Basrah the Sirdars held a meeting, and after a discussion came to the conclusion that some representation should be made because the place is held most sacred by Mussalmans. Each one took the Koran in his hand. But a few of the Sirdars commenced to act treacherously in spite of having taken up the Koran, and reported the most trifling matter to the Colonel Sahib from time to time, notwithstanding the fact that they themselves were the very ones who started the plea that it was not proper for us to fight in this area of the war [. . .] The Colonel Sahib reported the matter to the General Sahib, and immediately a battery of artillery and 3 or 4 British Regiments surrounded our camp. None of our men realised what was being done, and when they were told to parade without arms they forthwith did so [. . . But] the Sirdars sitting in their tents had written out nominal rolls of the men who had refused service. The British troops collected our arms, and looted our private property, taking the money of some, the shaving implements and watches of others. In the evening we were placed on board ship again, and for 3 days a Court Martial was held.Footnote 109
During the courts martial, Ghulam was one of 429 who were punished for their role in planning to mutiny. Three ‘Kot-Dafadars’ were sentenced to ‘penal servitude for life’, the other NCOs were to be transported ‘for 15 years’, the ‘senior privates’ received ‘7 years transportation’, and the 80 draftees to the regiment were dispatched to Bombay for three years’ imprisonment:Footnote 110
Our ship then left for sea and reached Bombay after a voyage of 5 or 6 days. There the recruits were disembarked, and our ship continued the voyage to the Andamans. When we arrived there, we were placed on a separate island, [and] a Colonel of the 4th British Infantry Regiment and 2 doctors were sent with us. Our uniforms were collected and sold for auction and the proceeds sent to our homes, and we were given convicts’ dress. Four Sirdars had been sent with us to the Andamans, three of whom were from our district, and they returned as soon as we had landed [. . .] The work we did was this. We built houses. We made a road, we felled trees and we made bridges of stones and the officials who came to inspect our work were astonished at what we had done, and left excellent written reports about us [. . .] The Commissioner of the Andamans wrote to the Viceroy on our behalf saying ‘These men are entirely blameless.’ The doctor sahib also used much influence on our behalf, and after 12 or 14 months the Viceroy, having pity on our lot, set us free.Footnote 111
Perhaps because of the experiences that he had been through, Ghulam styled himself as a ‘Maulvi’ even while offering to serve as a soldier again. Yet there was no contrition on his part: as he and other sipahis in the 15th Lancers stated: ‘We were blameless.’Footnote 112
Muslim soldiers in France and India seemed to agree. Within months of the mutiny dozens of letters were exchanged recounting the ‘story’ of the 15th Lancers and expressing their outrage over the punishments they had received. On 24 March 1916, Ashrafali Khan, a regimental instructor in the 6th Cavalry in India, wrote of how he had overheard the former colonel of the 15th Lancers talk to ‘his Sahib’ and proceeded to give an exhaustive account of all that he had learned before concluding that ‘the deeds of the regiment’ were now ‘written in letters of gold’.Footnote 113 Some months later Fateh Khan wrote in awe of how the men had ‘declined to take up arms against their brother Musalmans’ and asserted that this in no way constituted a crime:
[. . .] it has been reported in the newspapers that the new Viceroy [Viscount Chelmsford] has ordered that these men should be sent to some other theatre of war, since they did not in reality decline to fight for the Sircar, and should not be called upon to fight against the Turks against their wish. I do not know why action has not been taken on this order. It is very sad that fate should have dealt thus [and so] cruelly with the regiment in the end, after they have done such good service and gained so much renown elsewhere.Footnote 114
For others, their letters took the form of prayers for the release of those sipahis who had been to the penal camps of the Andaman Islands:
Please God, those men who were sent across the Kala Pani will soon be liberated. Do you also pray Government to deliver them from the misfortune into which they have fallen? I am troubled only at the long separation from you, and because of the calamity which has befallen those of my beloved ones who have been sent to the Kala Pani.Footnote 115
The soldiers involved began to petition for their release;Footnote 116 in at least one district in Punjab, lambadars from Niazi villagesFootnote 117 refused to allow access to recruiters from the 15th Lancers;Footnote 118 and rumours persisted of other sipahis in Mesopotamia engineering conditions of ‘friendly fire’ against British soldiers.Footnote 119 This enduring legacy of the mutiny in January 1916 explains the decision taken at the end of the First World War to disband the regiment. Ordinary Muslim sipahis had demonstrated the depth of their feelings towards their ‘brother Musalmans’ and had presaged the programme of the nascent Khilafat movement in India.
Conclusion: (re)writing a letter and (re)appraising Islam
The comments of the chief censor of Indian military correspondence in France, which periodically accompanied bundles of translated and transcribed letters sent to the India Office at Whitehall, were marked by a deep, irresolvable frustration. Captain E. B. Howell, the first chief censor of Indian Mails, was seconded from the ‘Political Department of the Indian Civil Service’ and charged with subjecting correspondence sent to soldiers to ‘systematic examination’ in order to preserve the integrity of Indian battalions from the wiles of ‘Indian agitators’.Footnote 120 Within a matter of weeks the focus of his operation had changed. Correspondence sent from soldiers was found to be far more dangerous. Letters sent from the trenches to India had rapidly increased in number and in length, and were said to collectively emanate a chill of ‘fatalistic resignation’ or ‘mental disquietude’ even when any ‘hint of resentment or anti-British feeling’ was absent.Footnote 121 The censor and his staff tailored their operations to try and better comprehend soldiers’ letters. They brokered extra funds, tried to find trustworthy translators for any scripts in which sipahis were literate,Footnote 122 and strove to convince La Poste—the French Postal Service—to redirect to the censor's office in Boulogne any mail that may have been posted by Indians using civilian post offices.Footnote 123
It proved a futile task. Howell soon complained that it was ‘far beyond’ his ‘powers’ to examine even a small portion of the total number of letters passing through his office, let alone analyse them ‘in detail’.Footnote 124 Letters were passed on without any changes because of the reluctance of British censors to excise letters that may have been ‘the last will and testament’ of the writer,Footnote 125 and the difficulty in deciphering the inscrutable nature of Oriental turns of phrase:
The first extract illustrates how almost impossible it is for any censorship of Oriental correspondence to be effective as a barrier. Orientals excel in the art of conveying information without saying anything definite. When they have a meaning to convey in this way, they are apt to use the phrase ‘Think this over till you understand it’, or some equivalent, to the reader. [. . .] It naturally follows that the news conveyed is extremely vague, and gives rise to wild rumours.Footnote 126
Howell continued his work until he was replaced in 1916 but without his earlier energy and enthusiasm. His reports remark bitterly that only a work of history or ‘some other book’ could make sense of the letters his staff had collated.Footnote 127 Howell's advice was heeded in part. When Rudyard Kipling was approached by Brigadier George Cockerill, director of Special Intelligence to the British General Staff, to author propaganda pieces for ‘neutrals at home’ in the United States of America, he was first handed transcriptions of Indian soldiers’ letters, proceeded to read through them, and then promptly decided to write his own fictional versions of the letters.Footnote 128 By the 1940s and the Second World War deep analyses of sipahis’ letters and their circulation were kept to a minimum. Extracts of correspondence were to be recorded but kept ‘under lock and key’ and ‘destroyed by fire’ when no longer of use.Footnote 129
But the letters remain useful for historical scholarship. Sipahis of the Indian Army were subjected to a twinned colonial gaze. They were simultaneously the sites of racial fantasies and military paternalism, charged with phantasmagoric ascriptions of hyper-masculinity while not being quite manly enough to escape colonial methods of discipline and control. Yet, despite being conditioned by the synchronic corpus of Indian military law and the diachronic military ethnographies of martial communities in India, sipahis remained only partially knowable: ‘excelling in the art of conveying information without saying anything definite’. Their letters, although censored and conditioned, translated and retranscribed, contain references to unknowable spaces and shared memories. Shared truths and knowledge were often elided over or only tangentially mentioned: ‘you will understand what I mean’, ‘think over what I say’.Footnote 130 Each invocation of collective memories and spaces allowed for specific meanings and ideas to be relayed that were only partially decipherable by the censor and which can only be guessed at by readers of the material today. The fact that military letters were conditioned and regulated by the Army, but rarely interrupted and excised, provided a greater incentive for sipahis to use only partially interpretable language and concepts. Indian soldiers were aware that their military letters imposed constraints on the possibilities of ordinary speech. The length of letters was regulated by the thick blue borders of ‘letter cards’ or pieces of paper upon which sipahis’ letters had to be scribbled. Letters were read out and translated by a NCO to an officer, often in front of other men or the letter-writer, as a form of regimental censorship. After that, any letters would have to pass through the office of the ‘chief censor’ where they were marked with a censor's stamp. At each stage the language of sipahis’ letters was deeply conditioned, but it was precisely those conditions in which letters were written that fostered polysemy. Regimental and supra-regimental censorship forbade the explicit relaying of information and encouraged soldiers to use metaphors, allusions, and abbreviations.
The Snowball letter is an example of the depths of the frustration experienced by colonial officialdom and the depths of soldiering polysemy. It proved impossible for the chief censor to regulate and stop—and the missive came to be termed the Snowball letter because the frequency with which it was transmitted or referred to increased as the war raged on. It was both the manifestation of a particular eschatological dream that had been circulating for a century-and-a-half before the First World War in the wider Islamic world and infused with contemporary South Asian relevance. Its form and tone were shaped by the street debates of Muslim reform movements in colonial India as well as German and Ahmadiyya propaganda in the trenches of France. And as the letter was transcribed and retranscribed and then passed on, its language slipped into the everyday prose and concerns of soldiers. The borrowed prose became a way of conveying the horrors of trench warfare; its apocalyptic tone and prospect of redemption given new relevance amid the broken bodies and unburied corpses of France—‘The life which we are now leading is one which God would not inflict even on a dog, as it is a time of unspeakable hardship with death always at hand, and perhaps by the grace of God we may gain heaven by reason of our self-denial [. . .]. Amen!’Footnote 131
The Snowball letter was also marked by its impermanency. As the letter was read, rewritten, and retransmitted, it evolved into forms that are tangentially connected to the original. The version of the Snowball that was finally transcribed by the censor in July 1916 hints at earlier versions—‘Once more [in the past] I gave this warning to the faithful but no one attended to it [. . .]’Footnote 132—and it is possible that Sheikh Ahmad's dream was repackaged into another, quite different, version later in the First World War. It is impossible to know for certain. Only a fragment of soldiers’ correspondence was ever intercepted, transcribed, and censored. It becomes difficult to ascertain quite how far its message reached and to what extent attitudes towards interracial sex and Turkey shifted solely in response to the Snowball letter. But even though the Snowball letter was only part of a wider, and now largely imperceptible, conversation about their religion in which Muslim soldiers were engaged, it remains significant. It exposes how colonial soldiers lived between the ideals of colonizer and colonized, home and periphery. Sipahis lived at the interstices of empire, shifting colonized and colonizing bodies who engaged in long conversations over the nature of French imperialism in Algeria,Footnote 133 the possibilities of future constitutional settlements in India,Footnote 134 and, more prosaically, how women in Europe ‘contrary to the custom in our country [. . .] do not put their legs over the shoulders when they go with a man’.Footnote 135 The Snowball letter reveals a sub- or semi-textual counterpart to the printed tracts of the Muslim reform movements of the time: more dependent on dreams, metaphor, and constant reinterpretation than force of argument. Finally, it demonstrates that Muslim sipahis could continue to act as conduits for the return of miracles, saints, and prophetic dreams to the rational colonial projects of cantonments and the Army well into the twentieth century. The decision to censor the letters of sipahis was originally taken because of concerns that Indian political agitators abroad—Ghadar and the Indian Independence Committee in Berlin—would make attempts to suborn serving soldiers. The transmission of Sheikh Ahmad's dream reveals that the militarized Muslims of the Indian Army were quite able to politicize themselves without the need for any agents provocateurs:
I suppose I am young and young men are rather foolish. Else why did I leave my father and mother and come away from my country to lose my life in the service of the infidel? [. . .] Corpses lie unburied on the ground, just as stones lie in our country. They are in a dreadful state, and the shots from the big guns lift up the men from the ground as in our country the whirlwinds lift up little things in the air.Footnote 136
