Tale of Two Narratives: Indian Medical Personnel in the First World War

Abstract

This paper interrogates two interconnected narratives – Sisir Sarbadhikari’s Abhi Le Baghdad and the biography of Dr Kalyan Mukhopadhya which feature the travails of Bengali medical personnel serving with the British forces at the Mesopotamian front during the First World War. The central question that resonates throughout the article is one of representation, for both the narratives raise a host of issues, including the Bengali male’s uneasy engagement with his masculinity, nationalism, pacifism, the futility of war and Pan-Asian cosmopolitanism. The relative lack of rancour towards the opposing Turkish forces, who were held as protagonists of both prisoners’ narratives, leads us to the fundamental tenor of this article – are the assertions and absences, implicit and explicit, in these two narratives rooted in their specific contexts or could they be touted as widely representative of the Bengali ‘bhadralok’ mentality of the times?