The Coolie’s Great War

In 1915, Sukha Kalloo was buried in the local churchyard in Brockenhurst, England, near the Lady Hardinge Hospital. A hospital sweeper from Bareilly who died during his war service, Kalloo was an “untouchable” whose stigmatized status led to his burial amongst several New Zealand gravesites—alongside an epitaph celebrating his “sacrifice” for “King & Empire.” Pieced together from official correspondence, fictional narrative, and a very real headstone, Kalloo is one of many laborers whose global experiences Radhika Singha reconstructs in The Coolie’s Great War. Arriving amid a wave of new histories of the empire at war, Singha reminds us that the global dimensions of the conflict were not limited to soldiers, but rather, were supported and augmented by a diverse, integral workforce of non-combatants, from sweepers and mule drivers to water carriers and stretcher bearers. In “rescu[ing] the coolie and ‘the menial’... from historical obscurity,” Singha aligns military history and labor history to challenge Eurocentric narratives of World War One (3).

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