Since this is Veteran’s day in the United States I felt it was most appropriate to have a post about military matters. Embassy Magazine is a publication targeting the diplomat community in the Ottawa, Canada area and recently ran a piece about the often overlooked Brown soldiers of the two World Wars.
Over 1,300,000 soldiers of Indian ancestry fought in the First World War. It remains the largest volunteer army ever assembled in the history of the world. It was the largest number of soldiers fighting from the British Empire after those from the British Isles. Not Canada, not Australia, no other part of the Empire contributed as many troops.
Two and half million Indian soldiers fought in the Second World War. You might want to read those sentences again.
If this group of soldiers came from anywhere in the Western world and if they were white, there’d be monuments to them in every major Western capital in the world.
I guess thats the way of history though isn’t it? Whoever ends up in charge writes history by highlighting certain things and not emphasizing others.
But most of us don’t know about any of that. Instead we believe what we’re led to believe: that these wars were fought by Europeans or their descendants in North America, Australia or New Zealand, arrayed against the forces of blank — insert the word of your choice — across our world. If any soldiers from the colonies or dominions get featured in those narratives, they’re from those same places. Considering the origins of Kipling’s poem you could call it “the white man’s burden revisited”. Accordingly, we all, even those of us of third world ancestry, owe our freedom and the very existence of Western democracies to the European men and women who fought in the world wars.
Anyway in honor of Veteran’s Day I hope people will take the time to read this article. It is full of facts that should not be forgotten.
Did you know that the last undercover wireless operator in occupied France during the Second World War was a Muslim woman, Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan? Undercover agent, multi-linguist, pianist, writer of children’s stories, Khan once shot her way out of a German ambush. The second time she was captured, she was interrogated. They got nothing out of her. Finally, she was sent to Dachau and shot. She was 30 years old.
