The handwritten scrawl on the top reads, ‘This one, like many of them, has naked legs, some even walk barefoot. If you have a magnifying glass, watch how his beard is rolled up to his ears. This other one wears his sweater above his kaki [sic] jacket’. Huddled together, the group of turbaned bearded men stare at the camera with what seems to be a mixture of baffled disregard—arms stiffened, brows knitted—and pleasant surprise. Adding to the curious gaze of the camera lens, the inscription conveys the tone of ‘manners and customs’ representations of Indian soldiers and non-combatants, which were flooding the market during the war. The ‘foreign’ modes of attire and reappropriation of European clothing, fusing with ethnic priorities of maintaining beards or tying long hair in a certain way were an endless source of fascination for white soldiers and civilians alike. One of the most popular of these camp scenes replicated across print media and in sketchbooks was the tableau of the ‘Sikh bathing’, sometimes with the sepoy’s loose tumbling hair and bare body awkwardly exposed to the camera’s glare or being confidently flaunted before the photographic lens.

Printed in Germany, one of the major turn-of-the-century producers of postcards during its golden age, this tableau is centered around a sepoy washing the long hair of another Sikh soldier. The Sikh practice of wearing their hair in a turban had in fact become central to the construction of the heroic masculinity of the ‘Hindu’ sepoy from the martial or ‘fighting races’ of British India. Very often such ‘manners and customs’ depictions would choose a domestic and close-up, at times invasive, frame to document sepoy bodies ‘performing’ their cultural practices, be it cooking, shaving, washing their hair, working or engaging in leisurely activities at the camp sites. It is interesting to note that this busy slice-of-camp-life image capturing the visual markers of status, rank and race of sepoys, non-combatants like barbers and washermen, and officers (Indians could not rise above the British equivalent of a Major in the imperial army) was in circulation as a ‘real photo postcard’. This technical invention, facilitated initially by Eastman Kodak, enabled even amateurs to print any photograph taken with widely available pocket cameras from a negative directly onto photographic paper with postcard backs, thus widening the reach of subjects covered.

This dynamic battlefield scene draws our attention to the central figure of the lance-armed Uhlan soldier about to be vanquished by a sword-wielding ‘Indian’ cavalryman charging upon the Germans with his regiment in tow. In what seems to be an imaginary scene of combat from all accounts, the field-grey uniforms of the Uhlan cavalry regiments take on a shade of green while the ‘Indian’ lancers appear in a distinctive yellow tunic by which the Skinner’s Horse regiment of the British Indian Army (composed of Sikh, Jat, Rajput and Pathan squadrons) could easily be recognised. Whatever creative liberties the possibly French artist may have taken, this epic scene of belligerent haste with which turbaned horse-mounted ‘Indians’ rush to meet the lance-cap wearing men of the Uhlan regiment brings to mind the impact of the valiant ‘fighting races of India’—the ‘Gurkha’, the ‘Pathan’, the ‘Sikh’, the ‘Punjabi Mussalman’, the ‘Dogra Rajput’—on popular European imagination. The image of tall, fine-limbed sepoys with their flamboyant moustaches and regimental regalia began to flood the market, especially in the UK, in forms ranging from journal features to advertisements and collectibles like cigarette cards.

While the sepoy-body became the site of imperial propaganda both in France and in Great Britain, in German Prisoner of War (PoW) camps it underwent racist ethnological profiling. Besides being subjected to sustained anti-British propaganda in camps like Wünsdorf, sepoys were extensively photographed in a bid to record their physiognomies, cultural habits and religious practices. The bodies of these colonial troops were measured, their voices recorded, their speech patterns analysed, and a wartime racist vocabulary used to describe in ‘scientific’ studies the armies of ‘savages and half-savages'. As scholars have argued, ‘mugshot’ photographs became central to both ‘seeing’ racial difference and for constructing various physical ‘types’ in the name of serious academic research. Interestingly, the relaxed posture and warm expressions of the two sepoys in this staged photogravure from M ünster I, indicates a parallel history of camp-life in which amateur artists and photographers would often abandon ‘scientific’ distance to capture intimate scenes of the daily lives of the PoWs. While orientalist and racist worldviews and prevailing structures of power inevitably framed most of the surviving photographic documentations from the German PoW camps, one does come across the occasional album—like those of camp commander and amateur photographer Otto Stiehl, besides the more well-known Unsere Fiende (or Our Enemies)—which betray a more personal acquaintance and sustained engagement between the subject and photographer.

The image of a wounded sepoy being nursed back to health by the empire at various convalescent homes and hospitals was among the more popular war visuals circulating in the UK at the time of the Great War. Paternalism, pragmatism and desire for further prestige back in the colonies prompted British officials to cater to the needs of the wounded Indians, as medical care became the bedrock of imperial propaganda. On the one hand hospitals were set up along the south coast of England under the careful supervision of the Commissioner for the Indian Sick and Wounded Walter Lawrence, where shell-shocked and injured sepoys recuperated in relative comfort—often in luxurious spaces like the Royal Pavilion where suitable arrangements were made for their caste and religious needs and practices. On the other hand, from the surviving letters written back home by the combatants we get to know that neither their grievances regarding unequal pay nor their protests against returning to fight for the sarkar after having risked their lives once, were registered. However, postcards, films and popular visual aids called stereo-views consisting of two near-identical photographs taken from slightly different angles like the one we see here, propagated the supposedly philanthropic face of British imperialism to the world. In keeping with this mood, many of the staged stereo-views of the Great War—popularly manufactured by firms like H.D. Girdwood’s Realistic Travels—revisited scenes of ‘tender’ care lavished by English doctors, nurses and orderlies on their injured 'guests from beyond the seas’.

Fundraising postcards celebrating on home soil the bravery and sacrifice of Indian soldiers fighting on the Western and Middle Eastern war fronts were quite common. The one we have here is part of a series that was issued by the Maharani of Bhavnagar (Gujarat) for the War Fund and printed in Byculla (Bombay), to honour the exceptionally brave men who had received either the coveted Victoria Cross or some military recognition for their distinguished service to the Empire. Cards in the same series were issued in the name of well-regarded figures like Mir Dast, Khudadad Khan, among others, who had become part of colonial lore of military derring-do. Very often the photographs of these war heroes in cherished oval frames were accompanied by the account of gallantry (mostly in Hindi) that was being specifically recognised, like in this case the selfless act of a ‘Rajput V.C.’ shielding his wounded officer with his own body before taking him back to safety.

While the publisher of this postcard remains unknown, many of the postcards published in India used a strong vocabulary of resistance championing Home Rule leaders like Annie Besant and the brothers accused of having subverted the allegiance of Indian soldiers to Britain, Mohammed and Shaukat Ali. The rhetoric employed in outlining the 12 reasons stating why India should be granted Dominion Status featured in this postcard tips its hat to imperial loyalism while firmly asserting the ‘rational’ demand for nationalist self-assertion in exchange for Indian lives and treasures ‘poured out’ in Britain’s service. The clever strategies used in this postcard can be read alongside wartime speeches of leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak who supported India’s involvement in the war while arguing for conditional recruitment—self-governance in reparation for the sacrifice of Indian lives in the battlefields of France and Mesopotamia. The recto of this postcard incidentally visualises this changed relationship between the empire and its largest colony; imperial paternalism rings through Britannia’s address to a saree-clad Mother India almost fusing with the ‘majestic’ Union Jack in the background. The quotation appearing right next to the phrase ‘After the War’ reads as follows—“Well done, India! You have shed your blood for us and been faithful and true, now take your proper place as a free and self-governing member of our Empire.”