War News in India: The Punjabi Press During World War I

Description

The Punjab region of India sent more than 600,000 combatants to assist the British war effort during World War I. Their families back home, thousands of miles from the major scenes of battle, were desperate for war news, and newspapers provided daily reports to keep the local population up-to-date with developments on the Western Front. This book presents the first English-language translations of hundreds of articles published during World War I in the newsapers of the Punjab region. They offer a lens into the anxieties and aspirations of Punjabis, a population that committed resources, food, labour as well as combatants to the British war effort. Amidst a steadily growing field of studies on World War I that examine the effects of the war on colonial populations, War News in India makes a unique and timely contribution.

Andrew Tait Jarboe is Assistant Professor of History at Berklee College of Music, Boston. He is also a history teacher at Roxbury Preparatory High School, Boston. He holds a PhD in History from Northeastern University and is co-editor (with Richard Fogarty) of Empires in World War I: Shifting Frontiers and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict (I.B.Tauris, 2014).

'War News In India: The Punjabi Press During World War I raises the veil from over one of the most heavily recruited, ravaged yet hitherto silent of the colonial home fronts: the province of Punjab, which contributed more than half of the combatants from undivided India during World War I. Andrew Tait Jarboe's marvellous selection of the translated extracts of newspapers, framed by his thoughtful prefaces, reveals the intensity and diversity with which the war was discussed, debated and manipulated in the Punjabi press: from reports of various international events to Hindu, Muslim and Sikh aspirations and anxieties around recruitment and imperial 'duty', to deliberations on self-government, or a deep questioning of European civilisation. In the midst of the war's centennial commemoration, Jarboe has gifted us with a singularly rich and important archive which will be crucial to the writing of a more nuanced global history of the conflict as well as to anyone interested in the tangled lives of war, empire and the media.' - Santanu Das, Reader in English Literature, King's College, London