Sepoy
: The Indian Experience of the First World War

  • Poppy Sall

Student thesis: Doctoral ThesisDoctor of Philosophy

Abstract

During the First World War, over a million soldiers served in the British Indian Army. Of these, more than 60,000 died. Yet the substantive contribution of Indian troops to the war effort is largely unknown in the UK. Historians in this field remain few, while arts practitioners have largely neglected the Indian experience of the First World War as a subject for creative exploration. This practice-led doctoral thesis takes the figure of the sepoy—defined as a native of India employed by the British armed forces—and asks how he should be represented, and remembered, by a twenty-first-century Britain. It examines the genre of historical fiction and its relationship to academic research. How might a creative research method, via the development of a Young Adult (YA) novel, do more than traditional historicization: to imagine a sepoy’s experience of war, enliven debate over the UK’s colonial past, and educate the modern reader? In answering this question, the thesis consists of three parts. The first half introduces the topic, reviews the available historical evidence, and discusses the value of creative responses to the Indian experience of World War One. The second half presents Sepoy, a full-length novel, alongside a reflective commentary outlining the choices made and the challenges encountered during this project. The study finds that, while historians have in recent years used innovative methods to uncover the experiences of the Indian expeditionary forces, often in the absence of sufficient written evidence, the imaginative options, empathic tools, and ethnographic approaches available to the creative writer provide a stronger basis for a reconstruction of the past.
Date of AwardMar 2023
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • Coventry University
SupervisorLynsey McCulloch (Supervisor)

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