The Voice of the Voiceless: South Asian Soldiers under German Internment in the First World War

This project adopts an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the experiences and expressions of Indian prisoners of war (POWs) held in German camps during World War I. It will study sound recordings and handwritten materials in South Asian languages produced by the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission between 1915 and 1918, and are now preserved in the Lautarchiv of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Archive of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The study aims to complete a sociological, cultural, historical, anthropological, and literary study of the sources in the context of their time so as to be able to appreciate the place they deservedly occupy within the cultural and intellectual history of South Asia during the war. This project seeks to understand the positionality of South Asian POWs in Germany and reconnect them to historical trends back home. As a first step, the accomplishment of the task of listening, relistening, transcribing, and translating the POWs’ texts will prepare the primary sources for analysis. In the second stage, a mixed strategy will be used, involving three main critical approaches throughout: close readings of the POW texts, linking them to Sanskrit and contemporary Nepali, Hindi, Bangla and Urdu literature printed or oral of the first half of the twentieth century, and on this basis assessing how far the hypothesis of the study can be corroborated. Through an in-depth analysis of recorded voices and handwritten texts, the project seeks to uncover the suppressed pain and memories of the prisoners, as well as the social, cultural, and linguistic landscapes they originally inhabited. It will analyse the interplay between these primary sources and broader cultural phenomena, establishing connections between audio recordings, handwritten materials, printed books, and popular cultural practices. The research will also link these sources to South Asian literary traditions, testing the hypothesis that the soldiers’ recordings were influenced not only by their communal cultural practices and oral traditions but also by the subcontinent's thriving print culture and elite cultural practices. This analysis will be framed within the intellectual history of South Asia, with particular attention to print capitalism, cultural imperialism and cultural hegemony and will provide a compelling example of pre-partition India and Nepal. The project aims to understand how themes of confinement, isolation, uncertainty, identity, memory, and resistance are conveyed, while investigating how POWs maintained their sense of identity, community, and agency or adapted to the conditions of captivity. Additionally, the study will explore the impact of gender, race, and class on the prisoners’ narratives and cultural expressions.