Remembering the Colonial Soldier: The Indian Undertaking of the Imperial War Graves Commission, 1917–27

ABSTRACT The Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) was established in 1917 to build and maintain memorial sites for soldiers of the British Empire who lost their lives to the First (and later Second) World War. Part of this charge was a distinct ‘Indian’ project, arising from the Indian Army’s notable participation in the war and the colonial state’s politics of ‘non-interference’ and performative benevolence. This article investigates the early years of this engagement, primarily based on records held at the archive of the (now) Commonwealth War Graves Commission and a field visit to the Neuve Chapelle Memorial in France. It examines the IWGC’s initial deliberations on the funerary treatment of Indians, the bureaucratic development of connected commemorative policy in Egypt and France, and the building of the Commission’s first two Indian memorials at Port Tewfik, Egypt, and Neuve Chapelle, France. Tracing architecture, politics and policy as interrelated concerns, the article addresses a major historiographic gap and attempts to break from the Eurocentric and siloing tendencies of current scholarship. While it continues from recent research on inequalities in the IWGC’s work, it asserts that the organisation’s ‘other’ engagements need to be examined not only in view of differences, but in terms of their own histories as well. In so doing, it begins to relocate the global and imperial in the history of the IWGC.