The village of Dulmial, 150 km south of Islamabad, sent 460 soldiers to fight in the First World War. while 10,000 Jawans were recruited from Jhang district through elders of this area.They all were martyred because they have no know how of battle. The elders like Honorary Col Abid Hussain and other got vast landin return for this loyalty to British Government.
Dulmial is Dr Irfan Malik’s ancestral home, a GP who lives in Nottingham. Working with British and Pakistani historians, Dr Malik has unearthed the contribution of the village’s men to the Great War.
Men from Dulmial were sent all over the world from the Western front to Tehran, Iran to Basra in present-day Iraq.
“This was a massive contribution and almost every male who was able to in the village joined the army,” Dr Malik, 49, says. “They wouldn’t have understood where they were going or why but they would have been loyal to their rulers.”
There is a 12lb British cannon in Dulmial and a marble monument with the engraving ‘in recognition of services rendered by all ranks from this village’, honouring those who fought against the Central Powers.
According to Dr Malik’s research, British recruiters first arrived in the village in 1914 and were offering £30 for enlisting. Dulmial already had 21 pensioned Indian officers and 90 current serving sergeants at the time. After the recruiters’ visit, Captain E L Maxwell reported that there should be ‘no difficulty in getting men’ from the village.
This year’s commemoration of the Great War by the Royal British Legion is focusing on the huge sacrifice made by soldiers from the Commonwealth.
“Had I known this history as a kid I would have been more British and felt like I had more of a stake in Britain,” Dr Malik says. “We used to get abused by skinheads in the 70’s saying ‘what have you done for our country?’. Our elders knew about this history but couldn’t articulate it.”
Among the recruits from Dulmial was Dr Malik’s paternal great-grandfather, Subedar Mohammed Khan, a soldier who had been celebrated in the 33rd Punjab Regiment on the frontiers of British India. Subedar Khan had already visited Britain for King George V’s coronation in 1911 and was present in Delhi Darbar when the King visited later that year.
Both his great grandfathers signed up to fight for the British in 1914 and, although already nearing the end of their careers, they were kept behind in India.
All of the men in Dulmial were to serve in the Punjab Regiment during the war, aside from 46 who joined the 27th Light Cavalry.
Around 50 of the Dulmial troops ended up on the Western Front – among them, a man called Lance Naik Ismail Khan, who was killed during the Battle of Loos in September 1915. His name appears on the Neuve-Chapelle memorial in France, which commemorates more than 4,700 Indian soldiers and labourers who lost their lives on the Western Front and have no known grave.
After the war ended in 1918, British authorities approached another decorated soldier, Captain Ghulam Mohammed, to ask how Dulmial’s contributions should be honoured. Instead of land or money, he chose the cannon which remains in the village today. It was transported by oxen cart in 1925 and presented by Field Marshal William Birdwood.
“We just want the acknowledgement that our ancestors also answered the call to arms in vast numbers,” Dr Malik says. “We want people to know that we were there too.”
An exhibition presenting contemporary artistic positions on lesser-known narratives from the First World War ended at Alhamra Arts Centre on Friday. Titled ‘Digging Deep Crossing Far’, the show featured artwork of 16 artists.
According to the note from Berlin-based curators Elke Falat and Julia Tieke, the artistic contributions raised questions about scenes of war beyond the western front, about religious and nationalist propaganda, about the history of science and about Germany’s relationship with Islam.
These positions add global perspectives to the dominant narrative of WWI in western history, and begin in Zosseb-Wunsdrof (Germany) where Non-European prisoners of war were held at the Halfmoon Camp.
The search for answers to the complex history of Halfmoon camp first led the project to Bangalore, Kochi in India and Karachi in Pakistan previously and most recently to Lahore in the Punjab province, which was a preferred recruitment area during the World Wars.
Berlin-based artist Bina Abidi’s sound installation presented two sets of voices both largely over looked in the official accounts of WWI.
The first set is a collection of folk songs sung by the mothers, wives and sisters of Indian soldiers living in Punjab, pleading their men not to go to war. “These songs present an antithesis of war songs, telling stories of longing loss and absurdities of war,” she said.
These ballads were recorded by the artist herself with the folk singers of Pakistan. Bina’s second set of voice installation is unheard voices drawn from the letters written by Indian soldiers to their families from the front, which never reached their addresses. The content, she said, has been censored because of the frank accounts of the horrors of war.
Bangalore-based contemporary artist Surekha’s installation titled ‘A Tale of Black Pepper and Red Pepper’ comprises old images and a video. She has attempted to redefine the representation of the role of Indian soldiers, extracting texts from official military archives in Bangalore and the internet.
The artist said her work especially explored the relationship between the ‘black and red pepper’ – a code used for Indian and British soldiers respectively.
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The varying and often contradictory notes (both official and anecdotal) describing the bravery of Indian soldiers as well as their revolt makes one reflect upon the legitimacy of these accounts, she said.
Karachi-based artist Muzzamil Ruheel’s artworks titled ‘Love Letters’ in acrylics and ink on canvas are about how thousands of young Indian men were lured into joining the army through propaganda only to find death and loss in Europe. When these soldiers wrote to their loved ones back home, their letters would be censored to a degree where no one could ever find out what was happening.
In this backdrop, Muzzamil’s art focuses on a young girl named Jugni, who hears so much from her lover at war but there is nothing in the letter to satisfy her desires and no one to hear her heartbreaking sorrows.
