More than three million men of colour were drafted into the armies of Europe during WW1, including one and half million troops from South Asia. Using a range of sources, from archival letters, artefacts, and paintings to contemporary statuary and 'poppy hijabs', this lecture will address some of the complexities of the colonial war experience and how they have been instrumentalised during the centennial commemoration. While the centenary has expanded the nature of war memory, it has also resulted in the sanitisation of the violence of both war and empire. Such a process prompts broader questions: how do we recover the colonial past in a multicultural present, and is it possible to commemorate the war dead without commemorating war itself?

Santanu Das is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture and a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is author of 'Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature' (2005) and 'India, Empire and First World War Culture: Writing, Images, and Songs' (2018) and, most recently, a co-editor of 'Colonial Encounters in a Time of Global Conflict' (2021).

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