Sepoy and ‘Menial’ in the Great War 1916–19201

FRONT LINES AND STATUS LINES: SEPOY AND ‘MENIAL’ IN THE GREAT WAR 1916–19201 Radhika Singha Inspecting the Lady Hardinge Hospital at Brockenhurst for Indians from the Expeditionary Force in France, Sir Walter Lawrence noted an act of local kindness. A burial plot had to be found for a sweeper belonging to a peculiar sect which never cremates. We asked the Woking Muhammadan Burial ground to allow us to bury him there, but they flatly declined. We then had recourse to the Rev. Mr. Chambers, the Vicar of Brockenburst. He came forward and kindly allowed us to bury him in his Churchyard.2 Lt. General George MacMunn embroidered this incident into a story about untouchable life, seeking to strike “a mingled vein of sorrow and glory”.3 The latrine sweeper ‘Bigha’ of MacMunn’s account is of the Lal- beghi community, whom he describes as “nominal” Muslims though untouchables. They therefore buried their dead instead of cremating them, so that they “might face the recording angels like any other fol- lower of the prophet”.4 The Imam refuses to bury the outcaste in his “cleanly plot” but the other hospital sweepers are “insistent that he must be buried”. Learning of the dilemma, the vicar declares, “Surely Bigha Khan has died for England, I will bury him in the churchyard [. .] And so Bigha, outcaste Lalbeghi, lies close to a crusader’s tomb, 1 I am grateful to Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Ahuja, Heike Liebau, Douglas Peers, and Katrin Bromber for incisive comments. A fellowship from the L. M. Singhvi founda- tion, Centre of South Asian Studies Cambridge, allowed me to use archival sources in the U. K. Epithets such as ‘untouchable’, bhangi, and mehtar are offensive, but blander words would excise the operations of power bound up with such terms. All manuscript references are from the National Archives of India, Delhi, unless other- wise stated. 2 Walter Roper Lawrence to Lord Kitchener, February 15, 1915, India Office Records, British Library, London, (henceforth BL, IOR) Mss Eur. F143/165, negative. 3 George MacMunn, The Underworld of India(London, 1933), pp. 44–45. In Anglo- Indian literature, the broom-wielding latrine sweeper was a figure of pathos, as also the subject of an all too familiar line of humour about the fanciful hierarchies of the servant compound. 4 Ibid. p. 44. 56 radhika singha in the churchyard of St Agnes Without [. .] Lalbeghi and Norman the alpha and the omega of social status”.5 There is no churchyard of St Agnes Without, but the grave of one Sukha Kalloo sweeper lies by the side of some New Zealand graves in the churchyard of St. Nicholas at Brockenhurst.6 Sukha was prob- ably the sweeper of Lawrence’s report, and the ‘Bigha’ of MacMunn’s fictional account, for his grave-stone is indeed subscribed to by the parishioners of Brockenhurst, and it has an Islamic arch, instead of the cross which outlines the grave of an Indian Christian sapper nearby.7 MacMunn added a second such tale of “pathos and glory” fashioned, he claimed, on another real incident. In this, Buldoo, a regimental latrine sweeper, inspired by his child-hood play at soldiers with a golden-haired English boy, assumes the identity of a Rajput sepoy and dies leading a heroic counter-attack from a trench in Mesopotamia.8 Clearly MacMunn was suggesting that it was in empire alone, in such spaces as the British home and regiment, that the untouchable found succour, not, as he crudely put it, in “Gandhi and his blather”.9 The demands which empire had made on India for the Great War, and the 5 Ibid. p. 45. 6 www.ypressalient.co.uk/New/Zealand/Memorial/Brockenhurst, (accessed August 5, 2008). 7 Ibid. 8 “The war story of an outcaste sweeper”, in The Underworld of India, pp. 261–277. The war- journalist Candler refers to an incident in Mesopotamia, where “a sweeper of the -th Rifles took an unauthorized part in an assault on the Turkish lines, picked up the rifle of a dead sepoy, and went on firing till he was shot in the head”. E. Candler, The Sepoy(London, 1919) p. 233. In a slightly different version, sweeper Itarsi, of the 125th Napier’s Rifles snatches up a rifle and fights in the battle of Sannaiyat in 1916, after which the other sweepers appoint him “to be their officer”. T. A. Heathcote, The Indian Army, The Garrison of British Imperial India, 1822–1922(West Vancouver, 1974) p. 114. 9 “The war story of an outcaste sweeper”. Transferred from a Rajput regiment to a British one where he breathes more freely, Buldoo is be-friended by a British pri- vate who teaches him how to handle a rifle. Ibid. Bakha, the protagonist of Mulk Raj Anand’s novel, Untouchable, is, like MacMunn’s hero, a regimental latrine sweeper, who models himself on the Tommies who “had treated him like a human being”. Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (1935, London, 1940), p. 9. European households, regi- ments or hospitals could keep ‘untouchables’ at a distance, citing sanitary reasons, or the sensitivities of other servants, but there was room for manoeuvre. Hazari, recalls that his grandfather and father longed for service with a European household where they would be treated “not as Untouchables but as servants”. Hazari, I was an outcaste, the autobiography of an ‘untouchable’ in India (The Hindustan Times, New Delhi, 1951) pp. 10, 45, 61. .

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