Subalterns at War

First World War Colonial Forces and the Politics of the Imperial War Graves Commission

Bibliographic Data

ID3592260
AuthorsMichèle Barrett (Queen Mary University of London, corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume9
Issue3
Pages451-474
Publication date2007-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueInterventions (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1369-801X • E-ISSN: 1469-929X
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13698010701618703
OpenAlexW1498608190
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited13

This paper considers the politics of naming in memorials of the First World War. That such memorials are highly political is shown in the case of the 'Indian' memorial at Neuve Chapelle: at the request of Pakistan, who wanted it to be retitled the Indo-Pakistan memorial, the War Graves Commission attempted to erase the word 'India' from the memorial's register, documentation and signage. Comparing this memorial on the Western Front with its counterpart in Mesopotamia reveals that the listing of dead and missing servicemen's names was a policy specific to Europe. Colonial rank-and-file soldiers, and labourers and porters, were normally not named on memorials elsewhere. In Africa, evidence from the archives of the War Graves Commission demonstrates a sharp differentiation between the treatment of 'white graves' and those of 'natives'. These practices, some formally encoded in a policy ruling, rested on contemporary assumptions about stages of civilization and lives worth commemorating. The paper concludes that the equal treatment in terms of 'race' and 'creed', which the War Graves Commission and its historians persistently claim alongside equality irrespective of social class and military rank, was an aspiration rather than a practice. Keywords: AfricacommemorationImperial War Graves CommissionIndian ArmyMesopotamiaNeuve Chapelle Acknowledgements This paper began as a contribution to a colloquium at Columbia University in 2003, which was held to mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's 'Can the subaltern speak?' I am grateful to Gayatri and to Rosalind Morris for inviting me to participate and for their interesting comments on this material in its early form. I am also very grateful to Alison Donnell and Robert Young at Interventions. For comments and advice as this paper developed, my thanks to Duncan Barrett, Santanu Das, Tracey Loughran, Keith McClelland, Nirmal Puwar, Peter Stallybrass, and to colleagues at the Imperial War Museum 'materialities' seminar, run by Paul Cornish and Nicholas Saunders

Commission · Creed · Neutrality · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Classics · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · South Asian Studies and Conflicts

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