Comparative Studies in Society and History 2007;49(2):412 –445.
0010-4175/07 $15.00 # 2007 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417507000540
Finding Labor from India for the War in
Iraq: The Jail Porter and Labor Corps,
1916 –1920
R A D H I KA S I N G H A
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
In the bleak spring of 1916, a military note expostulated about the slowness
with which the Government of India was finding coolies and porters for
British forces in Mesopotamia. At first, labor could be obtained only from
tribals of the Santhal Parganas and Chota Nagpur and by tapping Indian
jails: “Could there possibly have been a greater opportunity for India with
millions of men not usable as soldiers, to take a larger share in the war, or
even a larger share in helping its own Indian Army? From all accounts India
was burning to get such a chance, yet what happened? The honour of India
was upheld first by aborigines and then by convicts.”1
Germany, Turkey, France, and Russia all entered the war with mass conscript
armies at their command. Britain did not, but she was supposed to have vast
manpower reserves in her colonies. Of the 1.3 million combatants and noncombatants sent overseas from India, the largest number, some 588,717, went to
Mesopotamia, to the three Ottoman vilayets of Basra, Mosul, and Baghdad.
Of these, the number of noncombatants, at 293,152, was roughly equivalent
to the number of combatants, 295,565.2 Even so, there were bitter complaints
Acknowledgments: My thanks to Ravi Vasudevan, Nandini Sundar, Douglas Peers, Jan Lucassen,
Thomas Metcalf, and Rana Chhina for reading drafts, and to the reviewers of CSSH for
illuminating comments. I am also grateful to James C. Scott, Kay Mansfield, and the Agrarian
Studies Programme at Yale University for a fellowship that allowed me to supplement my
readings. All manuscript sources are from the National Archives of India, Delhi, unless otherwise
stated.
1
Cited by Lt. Col. W. B. Lane of the Indian Medical Service in his “Summary and Histories of
the Seven Jail Labour and Porter Corps,” Home, Jails, B, Jan. 1921, nos. 9– 11, and Appendices, 2,
par.2. (henceforth, “Summary and Histories”). Lane, Inspector-General of Prisons in the Central
Provinces, was advisor to the General Officer Commanding, Force D, for the Jail Corps. The
Porter Corps, both free and convict, worked under the Director of Supplies and Transport; the
Labour Corps under the Director of Military Works. Home, Political, B, Feb. 1917, nos. 353–
96. Two Labour Corps from Punjab, raised for Gallipoli, had also been diverted to Mesopotamia.
2
India’s Contribution to the Great War (Calcutta 1923), 78, 96.
412
F I N D I N G L A B O R F R O M I N D I A F O R T H E WA R I N I R A Q
413
that India was not providing manpower with the speed and flexibility that her
population of 320 million seemed to afford.3 The official defense was that in
India only specific communities, the so-called “martial castes and races,”
could be recruited as soldiers.4 The question that hung in the air was about
the supply of laborers and followers. India, after all, seemed to have a vast
reservoir of coolies.5
Manpower needs forced the Indian Army to discover martial qualities in new
communities, and the geographic and social trawl had to be made even wider to
find followers, laborers, and porters. The Government of India drew upon the
rural intermediaries and jobbers who channeled labor to railways and other
public works,6 the revenue officials and bazaar overseers who drummed up followers for the army, the headmen who organized corvée for military and civil
porterage and road-building in hilly and forested tracts, and the emigration
agents who found coolies for plantations overseas. European engineers, overseers, and planters were in demand as supervisors for Labour Corps, as were
missionaries connected with low-caste communities, “aboriginals,” and “primitive hill-men,” all good recruiting grounds for coolies.7 This article focuses on a
conjuncture when an acute bottleneck in labor supply drew the Army Department’s attentions to the penal and policed end of labor regimes as well. Over the
period October 1916 to July 1919, some 16,000 prisoners were sent from India
to serve in the Jail Porter and Labour Corps in Mesopotamia.8 In addition 1,602
prisoners were recruited for miscellaneous services, and among them we find a
large contingent of sweepers and a gardening unit.9
The opening complaint also exposes the effort to suck in labor from the
“aboriginals” of the Santhal Parganas and Chota Nagpur. Edmund Candler,
an “eye witness” reporter, summed up his impressions of the Santhal Labour
Corps:
3
Secretary, Army Department, India, 18 Sept. 1916, Home, Political, Feb. 1917, nos. 353– 96;
Report of the Commission Appointed by Act of Parliament to Enquire into the Operations of War in
Mesopotamia, House of Commons, 1917, Cd. 8610, 41, 129. C. Lucas, The Empire at War, vol. 5
(London 1926), 342; Lt. Col. A. T. Wilson, Loyalties in Mesopotamia, 1914–1917 (London 1930),
169, 203.
4
For an excellent account of combatant recruitment, see David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj:
The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (London 1994).
5
“It seems certain that an almost unlimited contribution was, and is available in India for labour
or garrison battalions.” J.W.B Merewether and Sir F. Smith, The Indian Corps in France (London
1919), 484. I use the word “coolie” as a category of labor fashioned at the lowest rung of the global
market in the nineteenth century. See J. Bremen and E. V. Daniel, “The Making of a Coolie,” The
Journal of Peasant Studies, special issue 19, 3&4 (Apr./July 1992): 268–95.
6
For an insightful essay on labor recruitment for colonial railways, see Ian J. Kerr, “Free or
Unfree? Railway Construction Labor in Nineteenth-Century India,” in T. Brass and Marcel van
der Linden, eds., Free and Unfree Labor, The Debate Continues (Berne 1997), 405–26.
7
Foreign and Political, Establishment, B, Dec. 1916, nos. 308– 9 (henceforth F&P); Home,
Establishment, B, Feb. 1918, nos. 191– 209; F&P, Internal, Oct. 1918, no. 241.
8
“Summary and Histories.”
9
“Summary and Histories,” 8, par.11.
414
RADHIKA SINGHA
The Model Coolie in Mesopotamia,
Recruits from an Indian Utopia,
The Simple Santal10
Quoting an Indian veteran, Candler cast this Corps as the absolute opposite of
the Jail Corps: “There is no fighting, quarrelling, thieving, lying among them,
Sahib. . . . No trouble with women folk, no gambling, no tricks of deceit.”11 Yet
the innocent flute-playing “primitives” of Candler’s fable had in fact regular
experience with long-distance migration, going in droves to the tea plantations
of Assam, and sometimes supplying porters for military expeditions on that
frontier.12 In spring 1917, when 50,000 men also had to be found for Labor
Corps for France, the Government of India cut a deeper swathe into “aboriginals,” and it also reached out to the “primitive hill-men” of the mountain ranges
rippling across the northeastern province of Assam into Burma.13 Here, from
the 1870s house tax, corvée, and the advance of labor commodification had
created, with greater and lesser degrees of coercion, coolie gangs for military
and civil road making and porterage.14
The manpower hunger of this war impelled the Government of India to
bypass or collapse the jurisdictional and normative boundaries it maintained
between one form of bringing labor to the labor process and another. The
instance explored here is the sending of prison labor to Mesopotamia.
Section 55 of the Indian Prisons Act, 1894, authorized the extramural employment of prisoners, but only in the province in which they had been jailed.15
The other example, which I do not investigate, is the stretching of officially
sanctioned corvée regimes in certain forested and hilly tracts to coerce men into
enrolling for the Labor Corps for France. The long-standing justification for
corvée was that it was exacted only in remote and inaccessible areas, that it
had a sanction in “customary” forms of tribute, and that it was not burdensome
because it was limited to a few days in the year.16 Yet, in 1917, when the
Government of India was pressed to find 50,000 men for Labor Corps for
France, then local officials allowed headmen and rural intermediaries to
deploy the powers vested in them for corvée. The compulsions of debt had
made long-distance migration familiar to many of the communities that came
under this pressure. However, corvée had the direct force of the state behind
10
The Times, 20 June 1917, 5. This Corps drew upon many tribal communities but the official
ethnic label was Santhal.
11
E. Candler, The Sepoy (London 1919), 218.
12
A. S. Reid, Chin-Lushai Land (Calcutta 1893), 199; F&P, External, Jan. 1915, nos. 53–54.
13
F&P, Internal, B, Aug. 1917, nos. 110– 15.
14
Piketa Sema, British Policy and Administration in Naga Land, 1881– 1947 (New Delhi
1992); Robert Reid, History of the Frontier Areas Bordering on Assam, 1883– 1941 (Delhi 1983).
15
Another illustration of this jurisdictional collapse is that militias raised for purely local service
were sent to serve in distant places both within India and overseas.
16
In fact, colonial territorial incorporation had involved the extension and rationalization of
“traditional” forms of labor tribute.
F I N D I N G L A B O R F R O M I N D I A F O R T H E WA R I N I R A Q
FIGURE 1
415
(Map) South and Southwest Asia 2006. (Source: Yale University Map Room)
it, and its application to labor recruitment for service overseas was unprecedented. Candler had waxed eloquent about the Santhals of the Santhal Parganas
and Chota Nagpur who had gone so “trustingly” to Mesopotamia.17 Now officials found themselves confronted with the Santhals of Mayurbhanj, a chiefdom in Bihar and Orissa, who rose in rebellion against attempts to force
them into the Labor Corps.18 And hundreds of miles east on the ManipurBurma border the “Kuki and Chin hill-men” marshaled an uprising, in part
directed against coerced recruitment to the Labor Corps, which opened up
another war front right within the empire.19
S E A R C H I N G F O R T H E C O O L I E I N T H E G R E AT WA R
The overarching political context was one which made it very important for
the Government of India to maintain that all army recruitment was “entirely
17
The Sepoy, 222
F&P, Internal, Sept. 1918, nos. 84–100.
19
F&P, Secret, External, July 1918, nos. 7–131; L. W. Shakespear, History of the Assam Rifles
(Gauhati 1980 [1929]), 196.
18
416
RADHIKA SINGHA
voluntary,” even when it was they were drafting labor from jails.20 The Indian
intelligentsia was seeking ways to indicate that it would “give labor its due” in
its conceptualization of national citizenship. There were political protests
against corvée in certain tracts, and demands that criminal penalties be
removed from labor contracts.21 Most significant was the campaign, which gathered force during the war years, demanding an end to the system of indentured
labor migration to British colonies.22 Indenture was a labor regime characterized
by five-year contracts that bound the emigrant to one employer, remarkably stagnant wages, and a complex of penal provisions to enforce work.23
Noncombatants are not the stuff of war drama, and the Labour Corps have
been slow to find their historians.24 But in India the erasure of the coolie
from official and public narratives of “India’s contribution to the War” had
special political inflections. The Government of India deliberately cast a military cloak over this coolie recruitment, to side step the formalities of the Indian
Emigration Act (XVII of 1908) and to distance it from this controversy over
indentured labor.
Followers who provided services in the battlefield, such as the mule driver
who brought in ammunition and the bhisti who slaked the soldiers’ thirst,
earned an occasional sentence in dispatches and memoirs. Merewether and
Smith acknowledge the “silent heroism” of the “unarmed and unwarlike”
Kahars, the stretcher-bearers, in France.25 The Labour Corps sent to France
and Mesopotamia drew the occasional humorous comment on the wild ethnographic mélange put together by an empire at war: “The Labour Corps in Mesopotamia introduced the nearest thing to Babel since the original confusion
of tongues. Coolies and artisans came in from China and Egypt, and from
the East and West Indies, the aboriginal Santals and Paharias from Bengal,
Moplahs, Thyas, and Nayars from the West Coast, Nepalise quarrymen,
20
An official compilation proudly claimed, “the only form of compulsory military service
employed in India during the war, was that applied to European British subjects.” India’s Contribution to the Great War, 203. The Registration Ordinance of 2 Feb. 1917 had extended conscription
to male European British citizens in India.
21
In the Kumaon hills a campaign against corvée stepped up during the war. B. R. Nanda, ed.,
Selected Works of Govind Ballabh Pant, vol. 1 (Delhi 1993), 188. For a fine discussion of pressures
to legislate for a formally free labor market, see Michael Anderson, “India, 1858–1930: The Illusion of Free Labor,” in, D. Hay and P. Craven, eds., Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain
and Empire, 1562– 1955 ( Chapel Hill and London 2004), 422–54.
22
For an invaluable account, see Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian
Labor Overseas, 1830– 1920 (Oxford 1974).
23
P. P. Mohapatra, “Assam and the West Indies, 1860–1920: Immobilizing Plantation Labor,”
in, Masters, Servants and Magistrates 455–80.
24
Nicholas J. Griffin, “Britain’s Chinese Labor Corps in World War I,” Military Affairs 40, 3
(Oct. 1976): 102– 8. D. Killingray and J. Matthews, “Beasts of Burden: British West African
Carriers in the First World War,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 13, 1/2 (1979): 7–23;
G. Hodges, The Carrier Corps: Military Labor in the East African Campaign 1914–1918
(New York 1986).
25
Indian Corps in France, 507.
F I N D I N G L A B O R F R O M I N D I A F O R T H E WA R I N I R A Q
417
Indians of all races and creeds, as well as the Arabs and Chaldeans of the
country.”26 In other respects they generate barely a phrase or an incidental
reference in military histories.27 Yet the archives reveal a hectic correspondence
between civil and military offices on the creation of human and animal
resources for those abstract subjects “supply and transport” and “military
works.”28
In August 1916, while battling with a crushing shortage of labor in
Mesopotamia, the Army Department had suggested impressment.29 The Home
Department refused, pointing out that it would be very difficult to work out an
all-India scheme, and too onerous to apply impressment only to a particular
locality. The biggest objection was that conscription for labor service “particularly outside India went enormously beyond anything on the statute book.”30
W. Booth-Gravely said there were forms of forced labor in some hill tracts
but that these were distinct to the locality and people had begun to object to
them.31 Under some irrigation and forest acts officials could impress labor
for emergencies, but impressment for war service was different and there
would be a strong political reaction to any such law or ordinance.32 Interestingly, the resistance put up by the urban poor to rough seizure of their
person in the plague epidemic of 1897 had left a legacy of caution.33 “We
know,” noted Home Secretary S. R. Hignell, “what dangerous consequences
attend any form of compulsion towards the person in this country, even if it
be undertaken in the interests of the person himself.”34 Lastly, agricultural operations would soon be in full swing, and landlords and tenants, the class from
which the Punjabi soldier was drawn, would resent the depletion of labor.35
There was another reason for not going down this road: “It is not that we
reject the idea of impressment as immoral,” went a Home Department note,
26
The Sepoy, 217. The spectacle was also a gratifying one, a marker of the belonging of diverse
people within the imperial polity, and those being drawn into its orbit.
27
We find only a line or two on labor in Brigadier-General F. J. Moberly’s The Campaign in
Mesopotamia, 1914– 1918, 3 vols. (London 1925). See vol. 2, 280, 359; vol. 4, 328–29.
28
The official figures for all labor units raised from India: 104 Labor Corps (1150 each), 13
Porter Corps (576 each) and 15 Syce companies (210 each). India’s Contribution to the Great
War, 91. These figures do not take account of short-term labor recruitment under civil contractors
for Mesopotamia. In addition there was a “Coolie Corps” with the Army on India’s North-West
frontier and a permanent “Coolie Corps” on her North-East frontier.
29
Note, 28 Aug. 1916, Home, Political, B, Feb. 1917, nos. 353–96.
30
Note, 3 Sept. 1916, Home, Political, B, Feb. 1917, nos. 353 –96.
31
Note, 1 Sept. 1916, Home, Political, B, Feb. 1917, nos. 353–96. This objection was set aside
the next year.
32
Home, Political, B, Feb. 1917, nos. 353– 96.
33
For a sensitive account, see D. Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic
Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (London 1993), 202 –11. Major-General A. H. Bingley, Secretary to the Army Department (1916– 1921), had done plague duty in Bombay in 1897 and 1898.
34
Note, 3 Sept. 1916, Home, Political, B, Feb. 1917, nos. 353 –96.
35
Ibid. A recruitment bonus and advance wages to pay off debts made landlords, headmen, and
jobbers more willing to round up laborers and followers.
418
RADHIKA SINGHA
“but that it would produce a panic.”36 Fear of being picked up by the army
might compromise other crucial streams of “coolie-menial” migration, for
docks, harbor-works, plantations, and mining complexes dominated by
British capital, not only in India but also in Burma, Ceylon, and the Federated
Malay States. Oil and rubber were crucial to military needs and labor migration
from India to Malaya peaked in the decade 1910 – 1919.37 These labor flows
took place outside the framework of indentured migration, and so they were
not as politically controversial. Even when the call for followers and coolies
from Mesopotamia and France was very urgent, the ‘free’ migration of
Indian labor to Ceylon and the Malay States was allowed to continue.38
Within India, too, the army came to an understanding with planters about a
kind of ethnic division of the labor market around the Assam tea gardens.39
There was a provision under the Indian Emigration Act (Act XVII of 1908)
that could have been used to send labor overseas for the army. Section 107
permitted rules and regulations to be waived if the departure was “under an
agreement made with, or on behalf of, His Majesty’s Government to labor
for hire.” The Sanderson committee, set up to suggest reforms in indentured
migration, had also carefully factored in an exception for infrastructures sponsored by the government of a British colony. Such laborers, it said, were
“throughout their indenture, practically servants of the State and under the
constant care of officers of the Government.”40
However, a gazette notification under Section 107 was not supposed to be
issued unless the Governor General in Council was “first satisfied that the
fair treatment of Natives of India . . . has, by rules or otherwise, duly been
secured.” Here coolies were being sent into a war zone and there would be
no Protector of Immigrants hovering behind the lines. Notification would
also bring unwanted publicity. Since the plight of indentured coolies had
caught public attention, the legal formalities of contract might even be
invoked on behalf of labor instead of only buttressing the employer’s disciplinary power: “It seems undesirable, for political reasons, to draw attention to the
fact that we are recruiting a large number of coolies from the very unwarlike
36
Commerce and Industry, Emigration (henceforth C&I, E), Oct. 1916, no. 2. In May– June
1916 premonitions of impressment stirred unease in the Central Provinces, an important labor
pool. Home, Political, Deposit, June 1916, No. 25. Lt. Wishart, an irrigation engineer sent
from Mesopotamia to get 4000 coolies, reported, “on two occasions when he had collected a
large number they suddenly had an attack of nerves and refused to embark.” F&P, Secret, War,
Feb. 1917, nos. 235 –66.
37
C&I, E, Jan. 1918, nos. 1 –34.
38
C&I, Aug. 1916, file no. 104, no. 5; Army Department, 11 Sept. 1916, in Home, Political, B,
Feb. 1917, nos. 353 –96; C&I, Jan. 1918, nos. 1– 34.
39
Tea planters were reassured that only Gurkhas and Jharuas, the latter “a generic term for . . .
certain forest tribes,” would be recruited as soldiers. The Pioneer, 1 Oct. 1916: 13.
40
Report of the Committee on Emigration from India to the Crown Colonies and Protectorates
(1910), 13, par. 44. The example one thinks of is laborers sent from India on three-year indentured
contracts to work on state railways in Uganda.
F I N D I N G L A B O R F R O M I N D I A F O R T H E WA R I N I R A Q
419
tracts of Gorakhpur and the East U.P. for work in however safe a portion
of the war area, and . . . it seems undesirable to treat these coolies as emigrants thereby putting them in a position to make afterwards complaints
of a nature which may be troublesome.”41 On 10 June 1916, therefore, the
local governments of Bihar and the United Provinces learnt that the Indian
Railway Board was sending one Rai Saheb Chote Lal, a labor contractor,
to get men for railway construction in Mesopotamia and that “though the
recruitment and embarkation of such coolies comes technically within the
scope of the Indian Emigration Act (XVII of 1908), the Government of
India find it desirable to treat this form of labour recruitment otherwise
than under the Act, and to allow the labourer to proceed to Basra without
the formal issue of a notification under Section 107 relaxing the provisions
of the Act.”42 If there were objections, observed the Commerce and Industry
Department, it could be said that the coolies were “only technically emigrants,” that they were actually being sent “as a war measure” and that
the “desirability of maintaining secrecy” could be pleaded.43
I have found little information on this arrangement under which contractors
recruited work gangs for short periods and supervised them in Mesopotamia.
The Railway Board merely had to certify that, “the coolies will be properly
paid and fed and otherwise looked after . . . food will be supplied free. The
actual rates of pay given will be such as to satisfy the responsible officer in
charge of the work.”44 The powerful Anglo-Persian Oil Company, in which
the British government was a major shareholder, also asked for and got a
suspension of the Indian Emigration Act to recruit skilled labor for its oil
works at Muhammerah and Abadan.45 It surreptitiously stretched this
dispensation to recruit unskilled labor as well, at one estimate some 1,000
men annually, throughout the war. This was in complete violation both of
the Indian Emigration Act, as well as a March 1917 war ordinance that
barred unskilled labor migration from India except under specific
authorization.46
41
Note, C. E. Low, Secretary, Department of Commerce and Industry, 11 Jan. 1916, C&I, E,
Mar. 1916, file 43, B, Sl., no. 1, my emphasis.
42
General Department, 1916– 1917, no. 90, pt. II, Maharashtra State Archives Mumbai
(Bombay) (henceforth, MSA), my emphasis.
43
Ibid.
44
Note, M. R. Anderson, Railway Board, 10 June 1916, C&I, E, June 1916, file 95, B, Sl., nos.
1– 3.
45
F&P, General, A, Feb. 1916, nos. 1– 6; F&P, War, B (Secret), May 1916, nos. 259–63;
General Dept., 1920, no. 989, MSA. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company also occasionally drew
upon the 12th Burma Jail Porter Corps. “Summary and Histories,” 12th Burma Jail Porter
Corps, 5, 7.
46
Sec 4(i) Indian Emigration Act, 1908, and Defence of India Rule 16-B. See C&I, E, Sept.
1920, no. 15. Covert recruitment of Indian labor by private firms in the Persian Gulf during the
war was quite extensive. General Dept., 1920, no. 989, MSA.
420
RADHIKA SINGHA
FIGURE 2 Burma Labour Corps, 1917. (Source: Tonkinson Papers, (Box 50), Centre for South
Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, U.K.)
In what follows, I focus on a more institutionalized strategy that was used to
bypass the Emigration Act, that of enrolling men as followers under the Indian
Army Act of 1911, and organizing them into Labour Corps and Porter Corps.
I N D E N T U R E D M I G R AT I O N A N D T H E I N D I A N A R M Y A C T
Porters and laborers, including those drawn from jails, were thereby cast as
part of the army of occupation in Mesopotamia, yet there was a resemblance
to indentured coolie migration. The army paid for passage, claimed exclusive
use of labor at predetermined wages, and enforced work and discipline not
by criminal provisions as in the case of indenture, but by another form of
extra-civil law, the Indian Army Act.47 One difference was that the regulatory framework meant to “protect” the indentured coolie was not in place. In
the case of indenture, the district magistrate and the Protector of Emigrants
were supposed to scrutinize recruitment for force or fraud. At the other end,
an Agent General of Immigration was supposed to see that the coolie was
not mistreated, and that the employer observed contractual obligations. In
contrast, army officers recruiting soldiers, followers, or laborers could be
notoriously cavalier about notifying local civil authorities.48 In the letter
47
Once enrolled as a follower, one faced police arrest and court martial for being absent without
leave or for desertion. Indian Army Act (Act VIII of 1911), Sec. 123(2).
48
General Dept., 1914, no. 1486, MSA; Judicial Dept., 1918, no. 253, MSA.
F I N D I N G L A B O R F R O M I N D I A F O R T H E WA R I N I R A Q
421
of the law, if not in practice, the planter could no longer flog his laborer,
whereas the Indian Army Act had a section on corporal punishment specifically formulated for the “menial” category of “native follower” when he was
on active service.49
I have dwelt on this comparison because in March 1917, when the
Government of India suspended all unskilled labor migration from India except
under special license, it said it was doing so to conserve labor for military
needs. There was a connection, but not such a direct one. The War Office
call upon India for labor gave Viceroy Hardinge and his successor Chelmsford
leverage to demand more consideration for Indian interests in the formulation of
imperial policy.50
On 22 February 1917, the Secretary of State for India had declared in Parliament that indenture would be maintained for five years “at the outer limit,”
while an alternative form of labor migration was worked out for Fiji and
the West Indies. Chelmsford was less than thrilled, because public opinion in
India was clamoring for immediate abolition.51 The Army Department had
been asking for a suspension of all coolie migration from India till it could
raise the 50,000 laborers now demanded for France in addition to those for
Mesopotamia.52 As a matter of fact, indentured migration was not numerically
significant enough to compromise military recruitment. The Bihar and United
Provinces local governments had said as much in response to a query.53
However the military request gave the Government of India the clout it
needed vis-à-vis the India Office and the Colonial Office to discontinue indentured migration and soothe the political outcry. The Commerce and Industry
department had outlined the stratagem: “The army authorities emphasize the
importance of restricting all emigration of Indian Labour overseas at the
present time. We must necessarily accept this view. I incidentally mentioned
this case to His Excellency this morning, and he was of the view that we
should seize the opportunity to discontinue, at any rate temporarily, recruitment of indentured labour.”54
49
For an offence in breach of good order, the commanding officer of any corps or detachment,
“on active service” could punish any Indian follower, if he was “a menial servant,” with twelve
strokes of a rattan. The provost marshal could order the same punishment. Sec. 22(1) and 24(2)
Indian Army Act (Act VIII of 1911), Manual of Indian Military Law (Calcutta 1922), 115– 16.
50
For instance, Hardinge and Chelmsford demanded a substantial role for the Government of
India in the future administration of Mesopotamia, referring repeatedly to the dependence upon
India for soldiers, personnel, and labor to hold this territory. R. J. Blyth, The Empire of the Raj,
India, Eastern Africa and the Middle East, 1858– 1947 (London 2003), 146, 161.
51
Viceroy to Secretary of State, 28 Feb. 1917, and 9 Mar. 1917, C&I, E, Jan. 1918, nos. 1– 34.
52
General Richardson, 25 Jan. 1917, and 13 Feb. 1917, in C&I, E, Jan. 1918, nos. 1 –34.
53
Bihar and Orissa Government, 26 Jan. 1917, United Provinces Government, 9 Feb. 1917,
C&I, E, Jan. 1918, nos. 1 –34.
54
Note, H. F. Howard, C&I, 14 Feb. 1917, in C&I, E, Jan. 1918, nos. 1 –34. My emphasis.
422
RADHIKA SINGHA
On 12 March 1917, an official press communiqué declared, “in order to conserve the man-power of India for the purposes of labor in connection with the
war the Government of India have decided to prohibit all labour emigration
except to the extent necessary to supply the minimum requirements of
Ceylon and the Federated Malay states.”55 What this ordinance suspended in
effect was indentured migration to Fiji, Trinidad, and British Guiana. It was
not that this measure diverted a huge coolie flow toward the Army, but that
the Government of India could distance the sending of labor overseas for the
war from indenture and its controversies.
THE BRITISH EMPIRE AS
“THE
BIGGEST MOHAMMEDAN POWER”
The Government of India’s initial hesitation about sending coolies to
Mesopotamia also stemmed from an uncertainty about its impact upon the Arab
population, who had good reason to treat it as a portent of permanent absorption
into the British Empire and perhaps an open-door policy for Indian settlers.56
A military and manpower crisis in the spring of 1916 overtook this hesitation.
The British Empire had a strong commercial and strategic hold over the
Persian Gulf and was tightening its grip over Basra. In 1914, recognizing the
vital importance of oil for the Royal Navy, Winston Churchill had acquired a
controlling interest for the British government in the Anglo-Persian Oil
Company. The protection of its oil works at Abadan in southern Persia provided
one of the reasons in November 1914 to send forces from India to occupy
Basra.57 Easy victories at the outset for Indian Expeditionary Force D made
Mesopotamia “the only bright spot” for empire at a time when casualty rates
in France and Flanders were appalling and the Turkish army was putting up
a stiff resistance in the Dardanelles.58
From the perspective of Delhi, the Persian Gulf was a British lake, the Gulf
chiefs were under British protection, and the Empire of India could absorb a
good chunk of Mesopotamia as well. The Sultan would have to be divested
of his standing as Caliph, a position from which he was trying to rally
support for his beleaguered empire. But as Hardinge and many officials in
India pointed out, the British Empire, too, could compete with the Sublime
Porte in terms of having a vast “Muslim world” within its domains.59 In a
context where waxing and waning multiethnic empires dominated the
55
C&I, E, Jan. 1918, nos. 1 –34.
F&P, Secret, War, Feb. 1917, nos. 235– 66; Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia, vol. 2,
280; William Willcocks, Sixty Years in the East (London 1935), 233, 266; A. T. Wilson, Loyalties in
Mesopotamia, 103.
57
Report of the Commission, 12; R. Evans, A Brief Outline of the Campaign in Mesopotamia,
1914–1918 (London 1926), 3 –5.
58
Hardinge, correspondence, vol. 3, 1915–1916, microfilm, Nehru Memorial Museum and
Library, Delhi.
59
Ibid.
56
F I N D I N G L A B O R F R O M I N D I A F O R T H E WA R I N I R A Q
423
imagination, “Muslim worlds” could be conceptualized around different political hubs.60 “British prestige in the Muslim world” was an especially important
issue for the Government of India, and this strengthened the temptation to make
a quick rush up to Baghdad.61
However, men and supply lines were dangerously overstretched. On 22
November 1915, Turkish forces massed at Ctesiphon inflicted a savage blow
on the Sixth Division advancing under General Townshend. It retreated
down the Tigris to Kut ul Amara, where some 13,500 British and Indian
troops and followers waited out a siege for five months before a humiliating
surrender to the Turkish forces on 29 April 1916. Such was the importance
placed on averting this event that three attempts had been made to lift the
siege. The casualty figures for the relieving force rose to the heartrending
figure of 33 percent.62 The “flower of the Indian Army was buried on the
banks of the Tigris from Shu’aiba to Ctesiphon. . . .”63
They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young,
The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave:
But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung,
Shall they come with years and honour to the grave?
(Rudyard Kipling, Mesopotamia, July 1917)
Kipling, like many others, blamed the Government of India for trying to
conduct the occupation of Mesopotamia too thriftily.64 But in fact the war
was making staggering demands on India’s fragile economy. This was a “sea
borne, sea supported, sea victualled” war, yet Basra had to be reconstructed
as a port before it could handle such a huge volume of traffic.65 Docks,
wharfs, quays, storage units, and barracks had to be built. Transport was so
inadequate that supplies could not be sent up to the troops at the front and
military mobility was seriously handicapped. Roads, irrigation, and railway
embankments had to be constructed of bricks molded out of the Mesopotamian
clay. Rivers had to be harnessed for water transport and to grow food for the
Army. Arab laborers were characterized as “unsteady,” too much coercion to
get them raised civilian disaffection to dangerous levels, and they were sometimes suspected of spying for the Ottoman army.66
60
For the importance of history made at interweaving imperial frameworks, see A. Hopkins,
“Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History,” Past and Present (1999): 198 –
243; and Selim Deringil, “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman
Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, 2 (Apr.
2003): 311 –42.
61
Hardinge to Governor General, Sudan, 15 Oct. 1915, vol. 3, nos. 116, 159.
62
Report of the Commission, 35.
63
Loyalties in Mesopotamia, 111.
64
Report of the Commission, 37–38, 74, 104– 105.
65
Ibid., 9.
66
P. Graves, The Life of Sir Percy Cox, (London, 1941), 193. In 1917, some Basra residents petitioned for a reduction in the labor demand and “begged that the supply might be sought in India.”
424
RADHIKA SINGHA
It is the environment, above all, that dominates contemporary accounts of
this campaign. Blistering heat in summer and freezing rain in winter, rivers
which flooded the country, liquefying mud into swamp, fly-blown hovels
and disease-ridden settlements, these were the hellish images used to describe
a landscape that had to be invested and transformed not only to win the war, but
to lay the infrastructure for colonization.67 This was where the coolie from the
subcontinent entered the picture.68
JAIL-RECRUITED SWEEPERS:
“NO
ONE WILL CARE”
From the spring of 1916 letters and telegrams began to pour in from the British
military command at Basra demanding followers, porters, and laborers.69
Blame was in the air and the Government of India was eager to retrieve its
reputation.70 This flurry of correspondence included an urgent letter from the
General Officer Commanding, Force D, in March 1916, which pressed for
450 latrine sweepers for Basra and Amarah.71 Clearly, the Army was feeling
overwhelmed in more ways than one. But why was this particular correspondence put into a confidential file?
Sweepers in the bazaars of India had heard enough about military reverses
and harsh living conditions to resist going to Mesopotamia. Military and
civil authorities were discussing the option of impressment, a reason for
secrecy. In addition, cholera had broken out in Basra, which was a danger to
troop health and a fact to be concealed, particularly from those being sent
into the thick of this epidemic front.72 In this context, the Quarter Master
General suggested the assistance of the Salvation Army, “already largely
connected with Doms and class from which latrine sweepers are drawn.”73
Gertrude Bell admitted that the demand for local labor pressed hard upon agriculture, and military
works were often not of public benefit, some “even directly contrary to local interests.” Gertrude
L. Bell, Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia, 1920, 19–20, 126.
67
Evans, A Brief Outline, 6–9.
68
His visage recurrently flashed before British officials grappling with schemes to “civilize”
Iraq. Grumbling about the failure of his efforts to cultivate English vegetables, the British military
governor of Nasiriyah declared, “What is needed is a good Indian mali to teach the Arabs better
methods.” Nasiriyah administration report, 9 in Reports of the Departments of the Civil Administration and of Military Governors in Territories in Mesopotamia, 1917. The migration of Indian
labor to the Persian Gulf is usually traced to the 1920s and 1930s, but this wartime influx laid
its path.
69
Mule-drivers, washermen, grass-cutters, bhistis, barbers, sweepers—all were in short supply.
Adjutant-General, Basra, 14 Apr. 1916, in Home, Jails, A, Nov. 1916, nos. 42–48.
70
Viceroy Chelmsford to Secretary of State, 18 Oct. 1916, Chelmsford papers, letters to
Secretary of State, Apr.– Dec. 1916, no. 36, 364– 66, microfilm, Nehru Memorial Museum and
Library, Delhi.
71
Home, Jails, A, Nov. 1916, nos. 42–48 (confidential).
72
Sir R. Craddock, 26 May 1916, in Home, Jails, A, Nov. 1916, nos. 42–48 (confidential).
73
Quarter-Master General, 23 May 1916, in Home, Jails, A, Nov. 1916, nos. 42– 48
(confidential).
F I N D I N G L A B O R F R O M I N D I A F O R T H E WA R I N I R A Q
425
Frederick Booth-Tucker, Special Commissioner for the Salvation Army in
India and Ceylon, proposed that sweepers be recruited from jails, using
Section 401 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which allowed conditional
release, as well as from the so-called “criminal tribes”:“. . . in Gorakhpur and
other districts members of the Dom tribe not yet ordered into settlements but
who it is desired to bring under control, should be given the option of enlisting
as sweepers, but failing this they should be required to find security in the usual
manner, and if they fail, should then have the same offer repeated to them in
lieu of going to jail.”74 Some background will explain why a Quarter Master
General turned to a Salvation Army General when sweepers were required:
Work regarded as “traditional” to certain low castes in India, often turns out
to be a status forged under modern institutional compulsions. Vijay Prashad
has shown how much the equation between the community known as
Chuhras and “sweepers” owes to colonial municipal and public health
drives.75 Some of the communities being registered as “criminal tribes” from
the 1870s were also being made over into sweepers for municipalities and
military cantonments.76
In the early twentieth century, as the Government of India began to feel the
need for welfare bunting, its interface with the Salvation Army and other
missionary bodies expanded. These organizations inserted themselves into
the policed end of the labor and services market, one made up of “industrial
settlements” for criminal tribes and some Borstals for juvenile offenders.77
However, at this conjuncture the government was single-mindedly concerned
about getting sweepers whereas the Salvation Army clung to its broader
agenda of social and moral transformation. Booth-Tucker wanted “the wives
and families of prisoners and tribesmen . . . to be ordered into a Salvation
Army settlement, to be supported by a family allotment of Rs.8 deducted
from the wages of each sweeper.”78 The Home Department concluded that
high-handed intrusion into domestic life would compromise recruitment and
decided not to involve the Salvation Army for fear of associating recruitment
with proselytizing.79 Instead, provincial governments were directed as a
74
Quarter- Master General, 23 May 1916, Home, Jails, A, Nov. 1916, nos. 42–48 (confidential),
my emphasis.
75
V. Prashad, Untouchable Freedom, A Social History of a Dalit Community (Delhi 2000).
76
In Gorakhpur in the United Provinces there was a concerted effort to compel the Maghiya
Doms, one such stigmatized group, to live within a walled enclosure and to turn them into municipal scavengers. The vagrancy and bad livelihood sections of the Criminal Procedure Code were
used to deter them from running away. Home, Police, A, June 1913, nos. 6 –7.
77
Ibid.; Home, Police, Deposit, May 1916, no. 5; M. Kamat, “The War Years and the Sholapur
Cotton Textile Industry,” Social Scientist 28, 11– 12 (Nov. –Dec. 1998): 67–82. Meena Radhakrishna, Dishonoured by History: “Criminal Tribes” and British Colonial Policy (Delhi 2001).
78
Home, Jails, A, Nov. 1916, nos. 42– 48 (confidential).
79
H. Wheeler, 24 May 1916, Home, Jails, A, Nov. 1916, nos. 42– 48 (confidential). However,
the Salvation Army did raise one ordinary Porter Corps from some “criminal tribes.” Home,
Political, B, Feb. 1917, nos. 353–96.
426
RADHIKA SINGHA
matter of “utmost importance” to get prisoners to volunteer as sweepers.80 In
addition, district magistrates of the United Provinces and Bihar and Orissa
were urged to recruit sweepers “from among the criminal tribes of Doms,
noticeably in Gorakhpur, Saran, and Champaran, who, although not in jail at
the moment, are always more or less on the verge of it. If the opportunity of
earning an honest and lucrative living were explained to them, in preference
to the precarious mode of living which they now follow . . . it is to be hoped
that further recruits might be obtained.”81 The ever-active Punjab government,
with a suspicious swiftness, found 337 men in its jails who were said to have
volunteered to go as sweepers to Mesopotamia.82
At the level of such a deeply “polluting” occupation, the line between criminal and low caste mattered little. Jail recruitment could be used without embarrassing questions about the degree of pressure used, and no particular offence
was regarded as a bar: “No one is likely to worry much where we get sweepers
from,” noted the Home Secretary.83 The blurring of this line had one advantage
for jail-recruited sweepers: they were given the same wage, Rs.15, as were free
sweepers.84 There may also have been fewer restrictions on them because they
were not organized into a distinct Labour Corps.85 Lt. Col. Lane noted disapprovingly, “They were in every sense ‘free’ in the Force, so much so, that two
jail-recruited sweepers who had been in the country under a year, were given
leave in the spring of 1917 from some unit.86 The fact became known
because a Jail detachment at Qurna came to know and asked for the same
privilege.”87
This first consignment of sweepers was blamed for an outbreak of crime in
Basra, leading, it was said, to a prejudice among some military authorities
against jail recruitment.88 However, there was a crisis in the replenishment
of dockworkers at Basra—supplies could not reach the front because they
could not be unloaded and attention turned again to the jails.89 The Quarter
Master General said he needed 4,000 coolies, 1,300 camel drivers, 500 washermen and 200 tailors for Force D, but admitted, “men of the follower class are
80
A prisoner who “volunteered” as sweeper would get a monthly wage of Rs.15, with a twomonth advance, free rations, and clothing. His sentence would be suspended under Section 401
of the Criminal Procedure Code, and remitted on his return. Home, Jails, A, Nov. 1916, nos.
42–48 (confidential).
81
Ibid.
82
Ibid.
83
22 May 1916, in Home, Jails, A, Nov. 1916, nos. 42–48 (confidential).
84
Home, Jails, B, June 1916, no. 1. Higher pay was explained to the higher risk from disease.
However a later file puts their pay at Rs.10 a month, the same as for those in the Jail Labour Corps.
Home, Jails, B, Aug. 1917, nos. 26– 32.
85
The miscellaneous units were less supervised. Home, Jails, B, July 1917, nos. 5– 6.
86
“Summary and Histories,” 9, par. 11.
87
Ibid.
88
Lane, citing the Provost Marshall at Basra, “Summary and Histories,” 2, par. 2.
89
Home, Political, B, Feb. 1917, nos. 353 –96.
F I N D I N G L A B O R F R O M I N D I A F O R T H E WA R I N I R A Q
427
reluctant to serve in Mesopotamia and . . . even high pay and a bonus will not
overcome their somewhat natural reluctance.”90 The supply crunch was made
worse by an excellent harvest in India that created a bustling demand for labor.
In September 1916, once again, the Army Department asked the Government
of India to consider impressment, and for the reasons outlined earlier, that
solution was rejected.91 And again we find the indefatigable Booth-Tucker at
the elbow of the Army member.
T H E J A I L P O RT E R A N D L A B O U R C O R P S : M E S O P O TA M I A
“THE MAKING OF THEM”
Booth-Tucker suggested that the framework for Labour Corps recruitment
could be provided by a remission of sentence scheme by which juvenile
offenders were transferred from Lahore Jail to a Salvation Army settlement in
Danapur and given work at a minimum wage.92 The Army Department outlined
the advantages: “The utilization of prisoners . . . may be regarded as a development of the Borstal system, with the additional merit that it is cheap, and does
not disturb wages or interfere with economic needs.”93 The prisoner who “volunteered” to go to Mesopotamia in a Porter or Labour Corps would be enrolled
as a follower under the Indian Army Act to serve “for two years or the duration
of the war, whichever is less.” The un-expired period of his sentence would be
suspended under Section 401 Cr.P.C., and remitted when he returned. He would
receive Rs.10 per month, food, clothing, and every six months a bonus of
one-month’s pay.94 The monthly wage for ‘free’ Porter and Labour Corps in
Mesopotamia began at Rs.15, but added up to Rs.20 with allowances, and it
was linked to a wound and injury pension and a family pension in case of
death—benefits not extended to jail-recruited corps.95
Why were wages given at all? In Indian jails it was not the practice to pay
prisoners anything for their labor; only those serving as overseers or warders
were given a small monthly allowance.96 In fact, Reginald Craddock, on the
Viceroy’s executive council, had suggested that there was no need to give
wages or to cast the scheme as a voluntary exercise. The prisoners could
simply work out their sentences in Mesopotamia.97 However, the Home
Department pronounced that this “would have wrecked the whole scheme. . . .
WILL BE
90
Note, 28 Aug. 1916, in Home, Political, B, Feb. 1917, nos. 353–96.
Home, Political, B, Feb. 1917, nos. 353– 96.
18 Sept. 1916, Home, Political, B, Feb. 1917, nos. 353–96, For the Borstal scheme, see
Home, Jails, A, June 1913, nos. 37–50.
93
Note, 17 Oct. 1916, Home, Political, Feb. 1917, no. 353 –96 (my emphasis).
94
Ibid.
95
F&P, Internal, B, Aug. 1917, nos. 110– 15. An earlier file mentions a wound and injury
pension for the Jail Labor Corps, but a later one indicates that this was not given. See Home,
Political, Feb. 1917, nos. 353– 96; and F&P, Internal, B, Aug. 1918, nos. 11 –18.
96
Indian Jails Committee, vol. 1, Report and Appendices, 1919–1920 (1920).
97
Home, Political, Feb. 1917, nos. 353– 96.
91
92
428
RADHIKA SINGHA
The Indian prisoner has a pretty good idea of Mesopotamia’s reputation.”98
This time, entire corps was being recruited, publicity was inevitable, and
these were not prisoners of “the sweeper class.” If jail recruitment was to be
presented as an extension of Borstal reform, then some monetary incentive
had to be given. Asking prisoners if they would “volunteer” was also something novel, because they were not consulted when put into labor gangs for
public works in India.99 This framework of “volunteering” would have significant consequences for the terms in which jail-recruited laborers interpreted the
arrangement.
Some 3,200 prisoners were gathered and a press communiqué was issued that
carefully referred to the earlier recruitment as an “interesting experiment . . .
giving well behaved and short term prisoners a ‘locus paenitentiae’; by granting
them conditional remission and employing them as laborers in Mesopotamia.”
It glided over the fact that the first call had been for sweepers with little
discrimination as to offence.100 This time the Army Department suggested
that certain categories should not be sent, for instance adolescents, or prisoners
sentenced for murder or military or political offences.101 Nonetheless, the
temptation was too strong to draw upon adolescents who had received some
craft or artisanal training, and the Punjab government, presumably “in loco
parentis,” sent off 405 juveniles from the Lahore Borstal.102 As the pressure
persisted, the net widened.103
One can only speculate about the mix of persuasion and coercion that was
used. Some refusals were effective.104 On the other hand, it is difficult to
understand why one Samandarkhan Samankhan, with barely a month and
a half left to serve, would voluntarily leave with the Bombay Jail Labour
Corps to replace a prisoner who had died.105 Why would four prisoners
from Bihar and Orissa who had completed their terms go with the
Corps?106 Perhaps they had not understood that as jail-recruited labor they
98
S. R. Hignell, 21 Sept. 1916, Home, Political, Feb. 1917, nos. 353– 96. In 1917 and in 1918,
when fresh drafts were needed from jails, the use of compulsion was discussed but once again
rejected. Home, Jails, Mar. 1918, no. 6, (file not traceable, index notation used).
99
Home, Jails, Deposit, Sept. 1918, no. 3.
100
The Pioneer (Allahabad), 23 Oct. 1916, 13. The newspaper report did, however, refer to
sweepers.
101
Home, Jails, B, Dec. 1917, no. 1. The Bombay Government decided to exclude “sodomites,”
“lightly sentenced murderers,” and political prisoners. Home, Political, B, Feb. 1917, nos. 353– 96.
Soldiers sentenced for purely military offences could volunteer for the free Labour and Syce Corps.
102
“Summary and Histories,” 3, par. 5. Thirty-seven adolescents also went from the Dharwar
juvenile jail, Bombay. Administrative Report, Bombay Jail Department, 1916, par. 16.
103
In 1918, men were also declared eligible who were serving a jail term, not for a specific
offence, but for inability to provide security for “keeping the peace,” or for “good behavior.”
Home, Jails, A, May 1918, nos. 3 –4.
104
Sweepers in the Delhi jail refused to go, but perhaps they were not pushed too hard. Sweeper
recruitment was putting municipalities, cantonments, and jails under great pressure.
105
Home, Jails, B, Aug. 1917, no. 16.
106
Home, Jails, B, Dec. 1917, no. 2.
F I N D I N G L A B O R F R O M I N D I A F O R T H E WA R I N I R A Q
429
would be under special restrictions, and that a suspended sentence would
hang over their heads for the entire period. Some of them certainly
thought that their status had changed, and ‘involuntary’ jail work was
over. A prisoner at Thane jail waiting to be shipped, “adopted the attitude
that having volunteered he would only do such work as he liked. There
had been a good deal of this kind of thing . . . and he was given fifteen
stripes not only for his own offence, but as a warning to others.”107
Significantly, a certain haziness about terms and conditions came in handy,
not only with “jail birds,” but more generally in recruiting. The Army
Department acknowledged that at the start of the war it had been able to
draw upon men who had enrolled as followers without fully realizing
their liabilities. Once the knowledge percolated that under the 1911 Indian
Army Act followers could not refuse to march with the regiment into
active service, even overseas, it became very difficult to procure them at
the old rates of pay.108
A
“SEMI-FREE
POSITION”: WORK, PENAL DISCIPLINE, AND
M I L I TA RY D I S C I P L I N E
The texture of the “semi-free” status of the Jail Corps would really be worked
out on the ground in Mesopotamia. The closer supervision and tighter restrictions considered appropriate for a jail-recruited corps exposed the men to an
extraordinary number of “orderly room punishments.”109 At the same time,
the degree to which some corps had to be dispersed over worksites made it
necessary to formulate more conciliatory strategies.
Referring to the high figure for “minor offences”—“irregular conduct,”
leaving camp without permission, gambling, “found with prohibited
articles”—one Commanding Officer concluded, “At first they were unable
to understand their semi-free position, and in some cases very severe punishment had to be exercised.”110 Officers complained that they were more
burdened than those supervising other Labor Corps, and attributed higher
“criminality” to the innate nature of their human material, not to the difference in the regime of discipline, work, and pay.111 Homosexual intimacy
was characterized as another aspect of the special perversity of the Jail
Corps. Perhaps officers were careful not to discover it in other encampments:
“Sex problems are always acute in convict life, and they are even more so in
107
Administrative Report, Bombay Jail Department, 1917, par. 14.
Army Dept. to Secretary of State, 19 May 1916, Army Dept. Proceedings, War, 1916–17,
vol. 2, no. 38134. Before the 1911 Army Act, regimental followers were not enrolled, so they
could not be compelled to accompany the regiment into active service. Thereafter they were
formally enrolled and were so compelled. Legislative Dept., Mar. 1911, nos. 158–78.
109
“Summary and Histories,” App. 5, “Offences.”
110
“Summary and Histories,” 10th Madras Jail Porter Corps, 8.
111
“Summary and Histories,” 12, par. 15.
108
430
RADHIKA SINGHA
their Eastern aspects and altercations, and these naturally took a somewhat
different angle in the semi-free atmosphere of the war-time labor
encampments.”112
Yet the special advantages of jail labor also had to be acknowledged. Prisoners were already attuned to institutional rhythms, had an internal structure of
command in the figure of the convict warder, and many had experience on construction sites.113 There is an affecting bundle of forms in the Maharashtra State
Archives attested by a thumbprint or a labored signature which tells of the
transfer of 515 men from a Deccan convict work gang to the Bombay Jail
Corps.114 Recruitment helped to decongest jails, which were bursting at the
seams with people swept in by the pressures of wartime inflation. The
number of military men among offenders had also gone up and jail recruitment
sent them back into the “zone of the armies.”115 The diversity of prisoners was
another attraction, since it allowed Lane to reduce the wage bill by replacing
free clerks, warders, and artisans with jail-recruits.116 Social standing
allowed some prisoners to take greater advantage of their new situation than
others. Ex-soldiers and the occasional ex-policeman were selected almost as
a matter of course as convict officers, and European prisoners as clerks with
a salary of Rs.30 per month.117
The Jail Corps were regarded as a useful standby against any assertiveness
on the part of local labor. They were used to break a strike of Arab labor
employed on brick making.118 Most of all, the value of jail labor lay in the
flexibility and continuity with which it could be deployed, particularly for
emergency tasks. Arab labor had been found “most uncertain,” declining to
work in the wet weather.119 The Santhals were described as steady and tractable, but one complaint was that they would not step up the pace of their
work. This was attributed to their slowness of understanding as “aboriginals”
112
Lt. General Sir George MacMunn, The Underworld of India (London 1932), 192. MacMunn
was Inspector General of Communications in Mesopotamia. However, when the figures for “unnatural offences” are given, they are nominal: 6th Punjab Jail Labor Corps—2; 8th United Provinces
Jail Porter Corps—4; 11th Bombay Jail Labor Corps—4. “Summary and Histories,” passim.
113
General, 1916–17, no. 90, pt. II, MSA.
114
Judicial Dept., 1917, no. 689, pt. VI, Convicts. MSA. See Figure 3 for agreement form for
conditional remission of sentence.
115
Judicial Dept., 1917, no. 1412, MSA.
116
The free warders often came reluctantly, were termed useless, and sent back. Home, Jails, B,
Nov. 1917, no. 13.
117
Ibid.; also “Summary and Histories,” 6th Punjab Jail Labour Corps.
118
“Summary and Histories,” 11th Bombay Jail Labor Corps, 3.
119
Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia, vol. 2, 359. The “labor problems” encountered in
the construction of the Shaiba bund, a crucial flood embankment, give us an idea of the situation.
Once date-picking started and the ground had to be prepared for cultivation, Arab labor could not be
found. This was harsh toil in the desert when work at high wages was freely available in Basra. The
Chief Political Officer was ordered to impress Arab laborers. With heavy rains in February 1916
they had to be placed in camps under military guard to prevent desertions. F&P, Secret, War,
Feb. 1917, nos. 235–66. The 11th Bombay Jail Labour Corps was put to work on the Shaiba Bund.
F I N D I N G L A B O R F R O M I N D I A F O R T H E WA R I N I R A Q
431
FIGURE 3 Form of agreement for conditional remission of sentence, 1916. (Source: Judicial Dept.
1917, No. 689, Pt. VI, Convicts, MSA, Mumbai.)
432
RADHIKA SINGHA
and sometimes to physical weakness.120 Probably the Santhali had his own
ideas about the work rhythm he would build up for the amount he was being
paid. His situation in a ‘free’ Labour Corps put him in a better position than
the jail laborer to protect his body from the extremes of overwork.121
However, if prisoners were too unwilling and worse still, strung out over
many sites, then longer hours alone would not guarantee output. A piecework
system was introduced that allowed them to top up their wages after completing
a fixed task.122 Officers encouraged the development of an esprit de corps, one
Captain Mathews for instance, urging work gangs to lay small bets to compete
for a higher output.123 In other contexts, by contrast, gambling was punished as
an offence that broke down hierarchy, dissipated savings, and encouraged theft.
According to Lane’s triumphant calculations, the Jail Corps cost one-quarter
less than the other Labor Corps for the same output.124 But between emergency
duty and piecework, the nine-hour workday was probably not being maintained
for prisoners.125 Nor does Lane give us a comparison of the statistics of death
and physical breakdown between ‘free’ and Jail Corps. It is significant that
some commanding officers linked desertion to unbearable work demands
rather than to any innate desire to escape. Captain Dickens attributed a rush
of seventy-five desertions from the 5th United Provinces Jail Porter Corps
simply “to the men getting tired and wanting a rest.”126
What about rehabilitation, the other component of the “experiment”? Prisoners had been told that by volunteering they would erase the stigma of jail and
win public recognition for their role in the war. In fact, the term Disciplinary
Labour Corps formulated for them never caught on and they were routinely
referred to as the Jail Corps, or Convict Corps.127 Men whose sentences
120
Lane cites a military note on the Santhals, perhaps to highlight the initiative, energy, and
diversity of his own Jail Corps: “Now the Santhali is not without his merits, but he is quite
useless for work requiring intelligence. What we wanted were Corps with a fair proportion of artisans . . . and intelligent labourers of the type found . . . amongst the daily labourers of the P.W.D and
the M.W.” (i.e., The Public Works Dept. and Military Works). “Summary and Histories,” 2, par. 2.
121
“They are not thrusters,” pronounced an officer; “they go their own pace, but they do their
day’s work all right” (The Sepoy, 220).
122
“Summary and Histories,” 11th Bombay Jail Labour Corps, 2.
123
“Summary and Histories,” 8th United Provinces Jail Porter Corps, 4. A case of robbing Peter to
pay Paul?
124
“Summary and Histories,” 11, par.13.
125
For a sense of this situation, “Summary and Histories,” 10th Punjab Labour Corps, 3 –4.
126
“Summary and Histories,” App. 4, 16. Overwork left its mark on this corps. It had the second
highest death rate, at 6.95 percent for thirty-four months, the highest invaliding rate, at 35.46
percent, and the highest figures for offences punished by court martial. Ibid. The largest percentage
of “Major offences” were for “Desertion and Absent without Leave,” “Summary and Histories,”
passim.
127
“Summary and Histories,” 3, par. 3. There was a debate about whether the term “jail” should
be put on their identity discs, or kept only for their service books. F&P, Internal, B, Aug. 1918, nos.
11 –18. I could not trace the final decision, but ninety-two men of one corps were fined for not
wearing their discs. “Summary and Histories,” 8th United Provinces Jail Labour Corps, 11.
F I N D I N G L A B O R F R O M I N D I A F O R T H E WA R I N I R A Q
433
would have expired had they stayed in India were retained in the Jail Corps,
though on higher wages, instead of being transferred to a free Labour
Corps.128 This saved the bother of transferring their documents, altering their
service books, and issuing new identity discs, but also allowed the police in
India to keep returning men under their eye.129 And finally, it was the penal
tag that sustained Lane’s claims to expertise in “handling convicts.”
One factor that began to blur the distinction between ‘free’ and jail labor and
Porter Corps was a common liability to military law. In India, jail superintendents had considerable discretion to order corporal punishment for breaches of
jail discipline. At first, commanding officers both of ‘free’ and Jail Labour
Corps in Mesopotamia simply handed down a flogging for various misdemeanors. But the Army authorities objected, and pointed out that since the men had
been enrolled under the Army Act a summary court martial was required before
such punishment could be inflicted.130 Lane chafed at this formality, and treated
it as an erosion of authority over prisoners. He also felt let down by the Army
Commander’s view that porters and laborers “were not under the same conditions as fighting men” for the offence of desertion.131 By 1917 desertion
was of serious concern to the Indian Army.132 It preferred sentences of flogging
for men enrolled as followers because executions or long terms of imprisonment involving repatriation meant a loss of labor. The death sentence was
given only in three “flagrant” cases of desertion from the Jail Porter and
Labour Corps. To resolve this penal dilemma, Lane started a Disciplinary
Camp in Kut and instituted a harsh regime of brick making in confinement
for all offenders of follower rank.133 In this blueprint for civilian jails in Iraq
we discover another convergence in the disciplinary framework for ‘free’
and ‘unfree’ labor.134
“WERE WE NOT PROMISED TO BE FREE?”
Jail-recruited laborers tried in their own way to see what going to Mesopotamia
could do for them. Traveling down to Bombay the men of the 5th United
128
Lane supported this policy, pointing out that in case of misconduct the men could still be sent
back to jail under Section 401 Cr.P.C., to serve their original sentences. “Summary and Histories,”
7, par. 10.
129
Home, Jails, Deposit, Oct. 1917, no. 1.
130
“Summary and Histories,” 12, par. 15; also “Summary and Histories,” 10th Punjab Jail
Labour Corps, 8.
131
“Summary and Histories,” 3, par. 4.
132
On 24 Oct. 1917, the definition of desertion was widened and rewards for apprehension
doubled to Rs.10 for a follower and Rs.20 for a combatant. General, 1917–18, no. 1284, MSA.
133
“A Short History of the Disciplinary Camp, Kut,” in “Summary and Histories.” There are
images here that may parallel those of Indian and British prisoners of war making bricks and
breaking rocks in the Taurus Mountains.
134
Ibid, n.p. Lane stayed on in Iraq as Inspector General of Jails, supervising three large jails
at Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul, and twelve smaller ones. Review of the Civil Administration of
Mesopotamia, 1920, 124.
434
RADHIKA SINGHA
Provinces Jail Porter Corps pulled the train communication cord “no less than
seven times” and by the end of the journey, seven were missing.135 From Iraq
there were overland routes to India familiar to Muslim pilgrims and a dhow
traffic along the Persian Gulf that swelled during the date season and was
difficult to monitor.136 Niches for escape also opened up within the burgeoning
military-industrial complex in Iraq and southern Persia. An Indian Christian
from the 6th Punjab Jail Labour Corps was discovered to be one Abdur
Rahman, at Muhammerah where a large Indian colony had come up for the
oil works.137 Mickie, a jail-recruited European clerk with the 12th Burma
Jail Labour Corps, deserted and joined the civil police at Amara. He was
detected only because he embezzled money there.138 The pressure under
which laborers and followers had been dispatched to Mesopotamia resulted
in a general looseness of documentation that was useful to the deserter.139
Often convicts had been sent off without a verification of their residential
address in India.140
The “retreat into one’s body,” to use Mark Harrison’s suggestive phrase, was
the other escape route.141 Convict laborers could not pass off self-inflicted
injuries as war wounds but disabled themselves by other means, for instance
by injecting their legs with an infusion of jequirity seeds.142 In the case of
Indian soldiers there were anxious and secretive investigations into rumors
of self-injury.143 For convicts, suspicion could be open and routine. Lane
seems to have regarded medical inspection merely as a means to root out
malingerers.144 Beyond the statistics, his “History” has nothing to say about
the dreadful toll exacted by respiratory disease.
Convict laborers made their own efforts to efface the stigma of jail. The 10th
Madras Porter Corps complained about the label “J” put on their khaki blouses
in India.145 A tally clerk was handled roughly by the 10th Punjab Jail Porter
Corps for calling them kaidis, or “jailbirds.”146 Another way to strive for selfworth was by translating the disciplines of a jail-recruited corps into the more
135
“Summary and Histories,” 5th United Provinces Jail Porter Corps, 1.
F&P May 1916, nos. 463 –78; F&P (Secret) War, B, Dec. 1918, nos. 51–52; A. C.
Wratislaw, A Consul in the East (London 1924), 162– 63.
137
“Summary and Histories,” 6th Punjab Jail Labour Corps, 7.
138
“Summary and Histories,” 12th Burma Jail Porter Corps, 1.
139
Army, War, 1916–1917, B 35936– 35938, and B 49801– 49854, and appendix.
140
F&P (Secret) War, B, Dec. 1918, nos. 51–52.
141
Mark Harrison, “Disease, Discipline and Dissent: The Indian Army in France and England,
1914–1915,” in R. Cooter et al., eds., Medicine and Modern Warfare (Amsterdam, Atlanta 1999),
185– 203.
142
“Summary and Histories,” 6th Punjab Jail Labour Corps, 6.
143
Jeffrey Greenhut, “The Imperial Reserve: The Indian Corps on the Western Front,” The
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 1, (Oct. 1983): 54– 73, esp. 57– 58.
144
“Summary and Histories,” 6th Punjab Jail Labour Corps, 6.
145
“Summary and Histories,” 3, par. 3.
146
“Summary and Histories,” 6th Punjab Jail Labour Corps, 5.
136
F I N D I N G L A B O R F R O M I N D I A F O R T H E WA R I N I R A Q
435
honorable disciplines of the military. This involved an effort to fashion a different kind of body. Some of the men took pleasure in acquiring a soldierly bearing,
and styling their headgear and clothes in a way which suggested military service.
Of a stretcher-bearer from the Bombay Jail Corps Lane noted disapprovingly,
“No. 5 was wearing a red and blue band with a fringe to his pagri and would
have easily been taken as belonging to a regiment. There have already been
instances of habituals impersonating Indian officers in this Force, and so, any
attempt at being anything more than what the corps is, viz. a Labour formation,
must be stopped.”147 And on another occasion, feeling frustrated by the constraints of military law, Lane wrote, “Flogging to a prisoner, especially a habitual, has very little effect, because it is a code of honour with them to take it
without a murmur. One also runs a risk of the man being openly impertinent
after it or being ‘dumbly insolent’ by saluting and walking off.”148
This aspiration to military status was probably most marked among prisoners
who had been able to remove themselves from rough labor, the stretcherbearers that Lane complained about and those selected as overseers, or in military terminology, as “officers.” For Lane, the figure of the jail-recruited officer
and that of “the habitual offender” overlapped. His own expertise, as he saw it,
lay in knowing how to tap the initiative and agency of the “habitual” without
allowing him to get the upper hand.149 Yet such was the reliance on jailrecruited overseers that despite Lane’s misgivings about their mimicking of
military command, they managed to secure a promotion for themselves—
from Naik to Havildar.150 Lane said he had chosen the term Daffadar, from
cavalry usage, because he wanted a distinct term for jail-recruited officers.
“Usage . . . proved too strong” and the designation Havildar used in regular
infantry units became common.151
Prisoners tried to turn their forced encounter with law and institutional life to
advantage in other ways. Lane complained about “the legal mindedness of
convicts” as the men used routines of inspection as occasions to present petitions.152 One kind of address was in the language of contract. The prisoners
repeatedly went back to that moment when they had been asked to ‘volunteer’
for Mesopotamia, insisting it marked their emancipation to the status of ‘free’
labor. Lane had to keep reminding them that their sentences had been suspended,
not remitted. And they would counter, “Were we not promised to be free.”153
147
“Summary and Histories,” 11th Bombay Jail Labour Corps, 4.
“Summary and Histories,” 11th Bombay Jail Labour Corps, 4.
149
“Summary and Histories,” 6, par. 8, and 11th Bombay Jail Labour Corps, 4, 6. The legal
criteria for convicting someone as a “habitual offender” was the subject of continuous debate,
but jail categories gave this figure a more satisfactory concreteness.
150
“Summary and Histories,” 10th Punjab Jail Labour Corps, 3.
151
“Summary and Histories,” 10th Punjab Jail Labour Corps, 4.
152
“Summary and Histories,” 10th Punjab Jail Labour Corps, 10.
153
“Summary and Histories,” 7, par. 9.
148
436
RADHIKA SINGHA
The more paternalist discourse they mobilized was the special bond which
military service had established between the sarkar and those who had rallied
to its call.154 Lane noted indignantly that one corps “seemed to think that they
were conferring a favour on Government by coming out.”155 But this appeal
could in fact strike a responsive chord. Lane had complained that the habituals,
wanted an “entire washout,” that is, to have their names removed from the police
register in India.156 Nevertheless, when men who had returned to India protested
about rough handling by the police, an executive order was issued that they
would not be hauled up for failing to register their residence: “[I]t would be
hard on a man who has done satisfactory military service and who would naturally think that he was a free man on return to India, to find that he had to undergo
further police supervision.”157 It is a measure of the place that the Jail Corps had
created for itself that in 1917 when fresh drafts were needed from jails, some
additional inducements such as the remission of fines were added.158
The most important way in which the jail-recruited laborer could erase his
institutional antecedents was by seeking the embrace of that all-encompassing
category, “Asiatic labour” or “Eastern labour,” used to describe the jumble of
followers, labor gangs, and mistris in British-occupied Iraq.159 A description
of the men at leisure shows that this was what was happening on the ground:
“Thirty to forty languages could be heard in the bazaar. Among the latter
under the strict but kindly supervision of Col. W. B. Lane were several
Indian Jail Labour Corps. Many were professional thieves, and taught the
local Arab a few lessons in an art in which he had hitherto regarded himself
as hors concours. They gave little serious trouble.”160
Scattering aided the effacement of stigma, and prisoners working in detached
units made themselves so useful that it was difficult to gather them in again.161
The engineer at Aziziyeh complained about returning a group that had become
proficient in brick molding and masonry to unskilled labor.162 A detachment of
154
From the days of the East India Company, prisoners laboring on public works would claim
that that they were sarkar ke naukar, that is, that they had entered the service of the ruling power,
turning that entity into a patron who could be supplicated for concessions. Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law, Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi 1998), 274 –75. Of course, such
declarations also had their ironic inflections, and in this case the “voluntary” contract was also
invoked to ask for the same legal status and wages as “free” labor.
155
“Summary and Histories,” 10th Punjab Jail Labour Corps, 10.
156
“Summary and Histories,” 7.
157
Home, Dept. note, 11 May 1917, Home Jails, A, Sept. 1917, nos. 10– 13.
158
Home, Jails, B, Sept. 1917, no. 6. As with soldiers, the need to force the pace of manpower
recruitment brought the family into view. In January 1918, the Bombay Government included the
Jail Labor Corps in its scheme to give free primary education to children of soldiers and followers.
General Dept., 1917– 18, no. 1284, pt. I, MSA.
159
See Lt. Col. J. Hall, The Inland Water Transport in Mesopotamia (London 1921), 26.
160
Loyalties in Mesopotomia, 280.
161
“Summary and Histories,” 6, par. 8; also 5th United Provinces Jail Porter Corps, 2–3, 8.
162
“Summary and Histories,” 5th United Provinces Jail Porter Corps, 3.
F I N D I N G L A B O R F R O M I N D I A F O R T H E WA R I N I R A Q
437
150 deputed to the Electricity and Mechanical Section learned to fix wiring and
electric lights and fans, and some became blacksmiths and fitters.163 Clearly,
the insatiable demand for services in Mesopotamia allowed some prisoners
to acquire skills and shape a new designation for themselves: mistri, or
skilled craftsman. Educated prisoners and ex-policemen found a slot quite
easily in the civil administration taking shape under British occupation.
Jail-recruited sweepers, too, aspired to the less demeaning forms of follower
service. Lane complained that some “argued that they were only sent out to
sweep mule lines, and remove litter . . . but they would not deal with human
excreta. Some stated that they did not know what they had come out for.”164
The remark is suggestive, once again, of a haziness in explaining terms of
service. Some were sent back to India to serve their original sentences.165
Others may have lost this battle to change their status, because we encounter
Indian sweepers on latrine duty in Iraqi towns, carrying out the occupier’s
mission of “sanitary reform.”166
THE STRIKE
On 4 December 1918, a batch of 229 men from the 11th Bombay Jail Labor
Corps refused to work on the grounds that their “agreement” with government
had ended and they should be sent home. They offered no violence, and their
strike lasted barely half a day before they were marched away by British
troops.167 But the incident set off alarm bells for the Army command in Iraq
about the duration of its agreements with labor units.168
In Bombay, the major port of embarkation for Mesopotamia, the new readiness of labor to take to strikes was evident, and labor assertiveness in India
would come to be regarded as a source of contagion for the Persian Gulf.169
However this background does not explain why one particular prisoner unit
precipitated a confrontation. I offer some lines of enquiry rather than a definite
conclusion.
The first batches from jails were enrolled for a fixed term: “two years or the
duration of the war, whichever is less.” Subsequent drafts were enrolled under
the indefinite formulation “for the duration of the war.”170 With the end of
163
Ibid.
Lane said they did know, but to get away from jail they had signed and trusted to the future to
evade the chore. “Summary and Histories,” 9, par. 11.
165
Home, Political, File 51/2/1922.
166
Report of the Health Officer, Ashar, 2, in Reports of the Departments of the Civil Administration, 1917.
167
Home, Jails, B, Dec. 1918, no. 12; “Summary and Histories,” 11th Bombay Jail Labour
Corps, 5– 7.
168
Home, Jails, B, Apr. 1919, no. 1; C&I, E, Aug. 1919, nos. 8 –9.
169
Judicial Dept., 1918, no. 253, MSA. The Persian Gulf Administration Reports, 1873–1947
(Archive Edition 1986), vol. VII (1912– 1920), 44; Vol. VIII (1921– 1930), 24, 38–40.
170
F&P, Internal, B, Aug. 1918, nos. 11 –18.
164
438
RADHIKA SINGHA
effective fighting and the signing of the Armistice on 11 November 1918, jail
laborers began to argue that since the war was over they should be sent home. “I
had to repeat over and over again,” wrote Lane, “that ‘Peace’ was not signed,
and that it was the ‘Cease fire’ and not the ‘Dismiss. . . .’”171 If the “end of the
war” was a phrase open to interpretation, the two-year limit seemed to provide
firmer ground.
On 1 December 1916, 935 men had been enrolled in Yeravada Jail on
two-year agreements for the 11th Bombay Jail Corps, and began to receive
their wages from this date.172 On 30 November 1918, their commanding
officer noted in his diary: “On the conclusion of work today, the men
cheered a good deal.” However on 3 December Lane told them that their “contract” actually began when they boarded ship on 15 December 1916. The next
day 229 men refused to work, surrounded Lt. Nielson, their former Commanding Officer, and appealed to him to intervene as their maa-baap, their protector.
Lane chose to interpret this as their taking Nielson hostage. The threat could not
have been very imminent, because Nielson was told to collect the men for a
palaver in which tact was not the keynote. Lane now said the starting date
was 23 December 1916 when the Corps arrived in Basra.173 Their tone, he
acknowledged, was not insubordinate till British troops arrived with fixed bayonets. “When the men saw themselves surrounded . . . they became insulting,
offensive and mimicked orders. . . . It was now my time to have no mercy.”174
Twenty-four were singled out as ringleaders, and tried by a Special General
Court Martial which handed down terms of rigorous imprisonment ranging
from one to eight years.175 The others were returned to India to serve their original sentence. Lane contended that if the ringleaders had got off, “the whole of
the Indian Porter and Labour element, and especially the Jail Corps . . . would
have downed tools.”176
The first jail-recruited batch from Bombay Presidency drew upon 515 men
from a Deccan convict work gang and eighty-two from a Sindh convict
work gang.177 Networks forged here may have provided a resource in
171
“Summary and Histories,” 9, par. 12.
General Dept., 1917–18, no. 1284, pt. 1, MSA; “Summary and Histories,” 11th Bombay Jail
Labour Corps, 5
173
“Summary and Histories,” 11th Bombay Jail Labour Corps, 5. There was some administrative bungling because the men had been enrolled twice over: on 1 December 1916 in Bombay, and
again in Basra on 23 December 1916. Home, Jails, B, Dec. 1918, no. 12.
174
“Summary and Histories,” 11th Bombay Jail Labour Corps, 6.
175
Ibid.
176
The strike did not spread to the other units, though a company of the 10th Punjab Jail Labour
Corps “did actually “down tools” on 10th December when 204 men were taken across the Diala
for return to India and re-commitment to jail. “Summary and Histories,” 11th Bombay Jail
Labour Corps, 7.
177
General Dept., 1916–17, no. 90, pt. II, MSA. Military Works in India co-opted the rest of the
Sindh convict work gang to build barracks and haul stores in Karachi port. Indian Jails Committee,
1919–20.
172
F I N D I N G L A B O R F R O M I N D I A F O R T H E WA R I N I R A Q
439
negotiating new situations in Mesopotamia.178 For Lane, the explanation was
almost self-evident. He hinted that the commanding officers had allowed the
“habituals” to get out of hand, two of whom he located in the Havildars of
‘A’ company, though they had not actually been in the crowd.179 Certainly
the degree to which this corps was dispersed would have created a marked
dependence on jail-recruited officers. The unit, noted their commanding
officer in June 1917, is “strung out from Qurnah to Samarra in 14 or more
different stations, in detachments of all sizes from 500 to 1.”180 On arrival,
the men had been put onto a crucial embankment, the Shaiba Bund, but their
Commanding Officer Capt. Mackay felt the pace was very slack. Rejecting
harsher punishment as impractical, he formulated a bonus money scheme
based on piecework after the completion of a fixed daily task.181 Mackay
had been a partner in a commercial firm and Lane felt he tried to manage his
corps as “labor” rather than as convicts: “He steadily worked to get all reference
to the word ‘Jail’ or ‘convict’ removed and interpreted the freedom given them
in the fullest sense that the men did. He did not want to know anything of their
antecedents, and so in this he differed from myself. . . . His pre-war training
gave him an intimate knowledge of labour contracts. . . .”182
Detached work, whatever its intensity, probably reduced the sense of duress,
as compared with Jail Corps working together at Head Quarters.183 However,
with wages rising for other labor units in Iraq the restiveness about the
low-wage structure that continued to cage them must have been rising.
Hauling coal side by side with Inland Water Transport coolies who got Rs.30
a month, men of the 10th Madras Jail Porter Corps had asked for increased
pay.184
One factor that reminded the Bombay men of their two-year term was that
this deadline was the ground on which they had been denied the home leave
given to some jail-recruits on “duration of the war” agreements.185 Finally,
from October 1918 this corps had been cutting stone and earth in the Khalisi
canal. This was brutally taxing work in harsh winter rain, and the uncertainty
about when their ordeal would end must have bitten cruelly.186
178
When Lane refers to the clannishness of “Sindhi habituals,” he may have had this in mind.
“Summary and Histories,” 11th Bombay Jail Labour Corps, 4.
179
Of the strikers, 131 belonged to “A” company, “Summary and Histories,” 11th Bombay Jail
Labour Corps, 6.
180
“Summary and Histories,” 6.
181
“Summary and Histories,” 11th Bombay Jail Labour Corps, 2.
182
“Summary and Histories,” 11th Bombay Jail Labour Corps, 7, my emphasis.
183
Desertions were sometimes more frequent from Headquarters, where discipline was stricter
than from dispersed detachments. “Summary and Histories,” 11th Bombay Jail Labour Corps, 10.
184
Their commanding officer commented, “The economy of working the convict coolies stands
out in this instance very plainly.” “Summary and Histories,” 10th Madras Jail Porter Corps, 3.
185
“Summary and Histories,” 8, par. 10.
186
“Summary and Histories,” 11th Bombay Jail Labour Corps, 3.
440
RADHIKA SINGHA
Shortage of shipping could make dates of embarkation uncertain. British personnel were pushing for demobilization and convict labor could not have had
high priority, especially when the need for labor was still acute. In addition, the
Bombay police favored a phased repatriation of Jail Corps.187 The Bombay Jail
Corps thought they would have to press to get a date for embarkation. The
harshness of the response brought home once again their special vulnerability
as men working under a suspended sentence.
Nevertheless the episode convinced the General Officer Commanding, Force
D, of the wisdom of maintaining contractual honesty with labor units, including
those recruited through “duration of war” agreements.188 “On various
occasions,” he pronounced, “when Asiatics viz Egyptians, Chinamen and
Indians have been kept under the stress of circumstances beyond their agreements trouble has resulted.”189 Those who wanted to go home should be
allowed to do so and fresh one-year agreements should be drawn up for
those who agreed to stay.190
In December 1918 the rest of the jail-recruited men on two-year agreements were repatriated.191 The 10th Punjab Jail Labour Corps signaled their
restiveness by creating a “crime wave,” and desertions from the Jail Corps
escalated.192 As military units began to be withdrawn, forced labor units
began to demonstrate their lack of viability. The strike also dashed Lane’s
hopes of presiding over a future Convict Legion scheme. In October 1919
the Government of India sent a telegram saying it did not approve of the
employment of convict laborers in post-war Iraq, and the last batch left for
India in January 1920.193
The continued need for Indian labor in Iraq, especially for railways and
railway building, posed special problems for the Government of India.
“Once we do away with the shield of a military organization,” wrote the
British Resident in the Persian Gulf, “we are confronted with the problem of
indenture labor and the emigration laws. . . .”194 Another headache for the Government of India was that while British authorities in Iraq kept demanding labor
and personnel from India, they started deporting “unauthorized” Indians,
187
Ibid., 6; General Dept., 1916–17, no. 90, pt. II, MSA.
General Officer Commanding Force D to Chief of General Staff, 29 Dec. 1918, C&I, E,
Aug.1919, nos. 8– 9. Of the 138,648 Indian followers under various departments (including the
Jail Corps) in Iraq, 71,745 were on “duration of war” agreements, and 66,913 on time engagements.
Skilled laborers were usually on the latter. Ibid.
189
General Officer Commanding, Force D, 29 Dec. 1918, C&I, E, Aug. 1919, nos. 8 –9.
190
Ibid.
191
“Summary and Histories,” 11th Bombay Jail Labour Corps, 8.
192
“Summary and Histories,” 10th Punjab Jail Labour Corps, 3; Adjutant-General, India to
Chief Secretary, Bombay, 19 May 1919. Judicial Department, 1919, no. 817, MSA.
193
“Summary and Histories,” 11, 13.
194
Telegram from Political Resident in the Persian Gulf, 31 Jan. 1919, in F&P, Secret, External,
Mar. 1921, nos. 46–51.
188
F I N D I N G L A B O R F R O M I N D I A F O R T H E WA R I N I R A Q
441
particularly peddlers and merchants, to prevent a settler population taking
shape.195 The strategy adopted was to keep all labor from India under military
command even if it was deployed by the civil administration, so that it could
still be cast as part of the army of occupation.196 In 1920, to sustain this
fiction, the term “Military Labour Corps” had to be interpreted to apply to
all Indian subordinate personnel and labor, skilled and unskilled, in Iraq.197
WA R A N D P O L I T I C A L T R A N S F O R M AT I O N : T H E
“LABOUR
ISSUE”IN THE
M I L I TA RY C O M P L E X
The imperial quest for labor yields new perspectives on the political transformations underway in the course of the Great War. The nationwide campaign
against indenture had made the Indian Army cautious about using the word
“coolie.” In India, labor and porter units attached to the Army on the North
Eastern and North Western frontiers were routinely referred to as the “Coolie
Corps.”198 In contrast, those sent overseas were referred to as Labor or
Porter Corps. The phrase “Coolie Corps” constantly resurfaced in official correspondence, and certain attitudes toward the coolie body also persisted in the
Army.199 By an amendment to the Indian Army Act in 1920, corporal punishment was abolished for all combatants and replaced by “field punishments.”
Yet flogging was retained as a method of discipline appropriate to the
“menial” type of follower when on active service.200
Nevertheless in this war the Indian Army also discovered that labor and services could not always be procured in steady and sufficient quantity by trying to
get it “on the cheap,” using the coercion of landed elites and revenue officials. It
had to explore a more rationalized strategy, setting up central follower depots
and allowing noncombatant wages to catch up with combatant wages.201
Flight and episodes of full-scale resistance on the part of those targeted for
noncombatant recruitment influenced this reevaluation, as did their marked
195
Home, Political, File 51/2/1922; C&I, E, Aug. 1919, nos. 8– 9.
C&I, E, Aug. 1919, nos. 8– 9. During the Arab insurrection of July 1920, 2,500 men of the
Indian Labour Corps were deployed for impromptu guard duty. Sir Aylmer Haldane, The Insurrection in Mesopotamia (London 1922), 108.
197
Commerce Department, Note, 11 Oct. 1920, F&P, External, B, Dec. 1921, no. 242.
198
F&P indexes, for example, “Recruitment for the Permanent Cooly Corps of the North East
Frontier,” F&P, Establishment, B, Aug. 1918, nos. 5– 6.
199
Home, Jails, A, Sept. 1917, nos. 10–13; C. Lucas, The Empire at War, vol. 5, 342.
200
Section 45, Indian Army Act, Manual of Indian Military Law (Calcutta 1922), 136. In
December 1918 the Indian National Congress confirmed a “Declaration of Rights of Citizenship”
which demanded, “corporal punishment shall not be inflicted on any Indian subjects of His Majesty
serving in the Army or Navy save under conditions applying equally to all British subjects” (The
Bombay Chronicle, 30 Dec. 1918). In 1920, it seems to have overlooked the retention of flogging
for “menial” followers.
201
Army Dept., War, 1916–17, nos. 49801–49815. One category of follower, the mule-driver,
was put on the permanent establishment of the Supply and Transport Department and achieved
combatant status. The Sepoy, 227; Brigadier V. J. Moharir, History of the Army Service Corps
(1914–38), III (New Delhi 1982), 251–52.
196
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RADHIKA SINGHA
preference for fixed and limited terms. An exit point was a vital issue when the
Army was the employer and any strike-like activity could be treated as mutiny
or desertion.202 In a context of rising prices, termination and renewal also
allowed a renegotiation of wages.203 Writing in glowing terms of the Santhals,
Candler reported that they had entered into one-year agreements of service
because they had to “get back to their harvest,” but could be trusted to sign
on again.204 One wonders which harvest follows this annual calendar. Again
in February 1917, when 50,000 men had to be found for Labor Corps for
France, it was proposed to enroll them “for the duration of the war,” but this
had to be dropped for one-year agreements.205 The Assam administration,
trying to recruit the “hill-men” of the northeastern tracts had telegraphed,
“Period of war alone is an indefinite time which might discourage recruits.”206
The “Kuki-Chin” uprising of 1917 – 1918, and other smaller convulsions in the
northeastern hill districts brought on by labor recruitment for the war, alerted
the Army authorities in France to the need to maintain contractual faith with
“hill-men” who had gone there in Labor Corps.207 The strike of the Bombay
Jail Labor Corps did the same for labor units in Iraq.
Indian soldiers were on regular establishment or recruited for “the duration
of the war.”208 They, too, felt that this war was so prolonged and so different
that a renegotiation of terms was only just, but their struggle had to take subterranean forms.209 Limited terms and rising wages could make “noncombatant” service attractive enough to cut into combatant recruitment. These were
not entirely separate streams as was sometimes claimed.210 The government
was concerned to preserve the pool of able-bodied “martial castes” for
202
For instance, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company drew upon the military authorities to bully
some Indian artisans whose contracts had concluded, and forced them to go on working until
replacements were found. General Dept., 1920, no. 989, MSA.
203
Eager to stress that labor recruitment for the Inland Water Transport in Mesopotamia was
“nothing in the nature of conscription.” Lt. Col. L. J. Hall wrote of hundreds who returned to
India at the expiry of their contract, then came back to enroll for second and third terms. The
Inland Water Transport in Mesopotamia, 126.
204
The Sepoy, 222.
205
F&P, Internal-B, Aug. 1917, nos. 110– 15.
206
Chief Secretary, Assam to Secretary, Army Dept., 7 Feb. 1917, Chelmsford Papers, vol. 18.
207
F&P, Internal, B, June 1918, nos. 294– 95; F&P, External, B, Aug. 1918, no. 4.
208
So, too, the followers attached to regiments and those who served in particular departments
such as the Army Bearer Corps, or the Supply and Transport Corps. F&P, War, B, Mar. 1918, nos.
384– 86, 22.
209
One such struggle emerged in the Indian Divisions in France and Flanders over whether soldiers wounded in combat should be repeatedly sent back into battle. See. Lt. Gen. Sir J. Willcocks to
Viceroy Hardinge, 27 July 1915, Hardinge Papers, letter nos. 78 and 153.
210
The huge casualty rates in France, Ctesiphon, and Gallipoli also shaped the choice. When the
Chief Commissioner of the North Western Frontier Province wanted to give his Labour Corps a
military or semi-military designation, he was told it would have an adverse effect on the rest of
India, “as the one stipulation we have always found labourers insist upon is that they shall not
be either employed, or treated as soldiers.” Secretary, Bengal Government to Member, Bengal
Executive Council, 2 Feb. 1917, F&P, Internal, B, Aug. 1917, nos. 110– 15.
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combatant service, and barred recruitment for Porter and Labor Corps first in
Punjab and then in the North-West frontier zone.211
The strategy of casting a military cloak over “coolie” recruitment for the
army overseas had other political consequences. The prestige of “war
service” and the special relationship it seemed to forge with the government
was something low-caste and tribal noncombatants drew upon when they
returned, both to seek concessions from government and to claim a higher
social status.212 The involvement of Indians in the war as soldiers and
coolies elicited a complicated response from Indian elites. At one level, sections of the Indian intelligentsia had begun to characterize the use of penal
provisions to enforce labor contracts as “unsuited to modern conditions” and
to lay the blame for such laws on “foreign” capital.213 Yet even as they
called for labor to be admitted to juridical equality, they also demanded a
“nationalization” of the labor market through stringent restrictions on the
emigration of unskilled labor. Coolies had to be protected against their
own “poverty and ignorance,” but this was also a quality said to compromise
India’s “national prestige” in British colonies and to encourage civic discrimination against respectable Indian settlers. Another imperative was to
preserve labor for India’s own economic development.214 The idea of
sending policed or criminal populations to labor overseas was rejected
through a somewhat similar prism of ideas. If coolies lost their moral moorings by being sent overseas then criminals were said to return worse than
before.215 On a more paternalist note, the members of the Indian Jails Committee of 1919 – 1920 said that even “criminal tribes” should be consulted
before shifting them around and recorded their total disapproval of a Salvation Army proposal to send them to labor in Iraq or in the tea gardens of
Assam: “The Indian is strongly attached to his local surrounding and is
usually greatly affected and depressed by transplantation to fresh climatic
211
“Summary and Histories,” 2; F&P, Internal, Aug. 1917, nos. 110–15.
Going off to France in Labour and Porter Corps is a scenario invoked in all Naga ethnohistories as a defining moment when the colonial government was put under an obligation.
Labour Corps recruitment in the northeast hill districts stimulated official ethnography and cast it
in a more paternalist mould. J. H. Hutton, Deputy Commissioner of the Naga Hill Districts, and
later Professor of Anthropology at Cambridge, wrote his account of the Sema Nagas in April
1917 while supervising recruitment for Labour Corps for France. J. H. Hutton, The Sema Nagas
(London 1921), 173. In northern India, in the Kumaon hills, low caste communities recalled
their military service as porters to plead for official patronage. See Figure 4 for a photograph of
“Pyarelal, a Dom catechist and his wife.” The caption says he “accompanied Dom Christian
troops fighting in Mesopotamia. . .” (SOAS/MMS/IN/LS/03/22). Doms, treated as untouchables,
would have gone in a labor unit, not a combatant unit, but here the military designation is embraced
as a source of social affirmation.
213
In November 1919, a bill was introduced in the Indian Legislative Assembly to pare down
the Workman’s Breach of Contract Act (Act XIII of 1859), which punished breach of contract
by imprisonment.
214
Legislative Dept., A, July 1922, nos. 1– 9.
215
Pandit Pearay Mohan, An Imaginary Rebellion and how It was Suppressed (Lahore 1920).
212
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RADHIKA SINGHA
FIGURE 4 Pyarelal, a Dom catechist, and his wife. N.d. Pyarelal accompanied Dom Christian
troops fighting in Mesopotamia. (Source: lantern slides entitled “Our Indian Fellow Workers,”
compiled by F. D. Walter, SOAS/MMS/IN LS/03/22.)
and other conditions.”216 Yet when they reconstructed “India’s Contribution to
the Great War,” Indian elites probably had their own reasons for letting the
figure of the coolie blur into that of the soldier. To defend their claims to
travel and settle anywhere in the empire, respectable Indians had to acknowledge the contribution of coolie labor to the enrichment of British colonies.
Yet the documents that bound the coolie to the penal sanctions of indenture produced a legally subjugated figure, not one through which capacity for political
self-rule could be projected. With the war Indian elites could construct their
fitness for citizenship on the services of a much more promising figure.
Uniform, medals, and military papers marked out a hyper-masculine body, permitted this time to shed blood fighting white troops, and in Europe.217 It seemed
that the Indian soldier could go anywhere in this war, even to color-hostile
Australia, and find a welcome.218 In the case of indentured migration, Viceroys
had often lamented that it was “the moral degradation” of the female coolie that
216
Indian Jails Committee, Report, 1920, ch. 22, par. 67.
The ease with which Hardinge could get men, resources, and money in the early years of the
war reveals the political investment in this figure. For a time the Indian soldier became a kind of
nationalist icon.
218
Hardinge had been apprehensive about sending an Indian Army escort with German internees to Australia given the opposition of white labor to the admission of Indians, but the soldiers
217
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445
made it difficult for them to defend the system.219 The entirely masculine nature
of coolie “migration” for the army made it more easily acceptable as “military
service overseas.”220
The revised Indian Emigration Act of 1922, passed in a legislature with
extended Indian representation, indicates that an imagination of military
responsibility added a qualification to the intelligentsia’s position on coolie
mobility. This enactment obliged the Government of India to get authorization
from both chambers of the legislature to send unskilled labor overseas “under a
contract to work for hire.” Yet one section of this act, specifically and without
any controversy, exempted from this restriction the sending of combatants and
noncombatants overseas on military service.221 Clearly the Great War had
given Indian elites the opportunity to find a valorous garb for their claims to
citizenship. It was one capacious enough also to cloak “coolies and menial
followers” struggling to reinvent themselves.
were received with great enthusiasm. Hardinge to Governor General Australia, 28 Aug. 1915, Hardinge correspondence, vol. 3, letter nos. 75 and 108.
219
Hardinge to Secretary of State, 28 Feb. 1917, C&I, Emig, Aug. 1916, file 104, Sl. no. 5.
220
On the frontiers of India this was not always the case. There were several hundred Sikkimese
women in the ten thousand-strong Coolie Corps, which accompanied Younghusband’s military
expedition to Tibet in 1903. Patrick French, Younghusband, The Last Great Imperial Adventurer
(London 1994), 201, 217.
221
Legislative Dept., A, July 1922, nos. 1– 19.