Reflections: Should Indians fight far from home?

A flowing red turban above an Indian soldier’s khaki caught my eye. He was among the Allied troops paying homage at the Thiepval monument in France during last week’s 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. The sight recalled Chandra Shekhar resisting pressure to send troops to Kuwait. His shortlived government had voted against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq at the United Nations. He had uniquely decided to allow American military aircraft to land and refuel in India. But he refused to send troops to West Asia. “We can’t defend our own borders” Chandra Shekhar said when I asked why he was so adamant. “How can our soldiers defend other people’s borders thousands of miles away?” He added in the same breath he held no brief for Saddam’s claim that Kuwait was part of the vilayat of Basra. Nor did he think the annexation had anything to do with Israel. He was just opposed in principle to Indian military involvement abroad. Perhaps, unlike me, he had read T.S. Eliot’s haunting poem, To the Indians Who Died in Africa.

I suspected that was not a sentiment the Indian Army’s top brass shared during the Gulf War. A few were probably ideologically motivated. Others craved the excitement and glory of action. For most the rewarding financial returns of operations under UN auspices was and is the main attraction. No wonder Bangladesh is one of the most active participants. Setting aside general factors, the Indian Army has special reasons for taking pride in its foreign exposure. The reasons for its involvement may have been political and involuntary like Lord Linlithgow’s arrogantly unilateral announcement of September 3, 1939, that India was at war against Germany. But once inducted, the Army acquitted itself with valour. Last week’s commemoration of the Battle of the Somme must have struck a chord.

Two Indian regiments — the 20th Deccan Horse and the 34th Poona Horse, which supported the British Seventh Dragoon Guards — took part in the first and only cavalry charge of the battle between the High Wood and Delville Wood area of France. That was on July 14, 1916, the day the French celebrate the fall of the Bastille. Although they were forced to retreat under heavy fire, their participation made history. It was clear to the strategists when they were ordered to provide back-up support to an infantry advance beyond High Wood, near the Carnoy Valley area of the Somme battleground, that the cavalry’s day was over. Two Indian cavalry divisions did remain on the Western Front until March 1918, when they were transferred to Palestine. But the shape of things to come stared them in the face. Tanks had replaced horses.

Many reasons have been advanced for bungling on the Somme front. Communications were poor. It now emerges the Germans dug tunnels under the Allied position and listened to all their messages, having already cracked the code. It wasn’t appreciated that the cavalry was supposed to charge only after the infantry had cleared the terrain. The ground wasn’t suitable for horses. The tanks which were supposed to clear passages through the enemy lines when the Indian cavalry were called to the front line again on September 15 failed to do so satisfactorily. The nature of the fighting and the climate came as a shock to Indian soldiers who were frequently deployed in working parties providing medicines and food to the front.

They were taken out of the line and rested in early 1915, but were soon back in the trenches and involved in some of the heaviest fighting. The Indian Corps provided half the attacking force at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in March, and the Lahore Division was part of the counter-attack at the Second Battle of Ypres in April. Indians again suffered heavy losses at the Battle of Loos in September. Of the 1.3 million who enlisted, more than 74,000 were killed. By early November the 47th Sikhs had only 385 men, out of 764, fit for duty. The bigger question is: Should Indians have been there at all so far from home? By way of answer, the scholar and philosopher, Sir Richard Sorabji, who is now associated with Wolfson College in Oxford, directed me to Eliot’s poem whose poignancy demands quoting in full:

A man’s destination is his own village,
His own fire, and his wife’s cooking;
To sit in front of his own door at sunset
And see his grandson, and his neighbour’s grandson
Playing in the dust together.

Scarred but secure, he has many memories
Which return at the hour of conversation,
(The warm or the cool hour, according to the climate)
Of foreign men, who fought in foreign places,
Foreign to each other.

A man’s destination is not his destiny,
Every country is home to one man
And exile to another. Where a man dies bravely
At one with his destiny, that soil is his.
Let his village remember.

This was not your land, or ours: but a village in the Midlands,
And one in the Five Rivers, may have the same graveyard.
Let those who go home tell the same story of you:
Of action with a common purpose, action
None the less fruitful if neither you nor we
Know, until the judgement after death,
What is the fruit of action.

I like Eliot’s separation of destination and destiny. But, as he says, duty can merge the two. I wonder what prompted him to compose the poem. Richard, nephew and biographer of Cornelia Sorabji, the first Indian woman barrister, doesn’t know. Does some erudite reader?