Healing the Empire: Indian Hospitals in Britain and France during the First World War

Desperate for soldiers to stem the German onrush in late 1914, the British deployed some 135,000 Indian riflemen-known as sepoys-to the trenches of France and Belgium. Between October 1914 and December 1915, these soldiers fought at the battles of Ypres, Festubert, Givenchy, Neuve Chapelle, Second Ypres, and Loos, suffering some 34,252 casualties. This article looks to the experiences of these men at segregated hospitals in France and England from 1914 to 1915. These hospitals served many of the same dual purposes facilitated by hospitals for English soldiers: namely, they sustained the war-making capacity of the Indian battalions. The Indian hospitals also functioned as sites of propaganda, reaffirming the ideologies and racial hierarchies of imperial rule for audiences at home, abroad, and within the hospital wards. But as this article demonstrates, wounded Indian sepoys were rarely, if ever, mere pawns on the imperial chessboard. Hospital authorities were committed to two policies: returning sepoys to the front and protecting White prestige. Sepoys successfully resisted both. In so doing, Indian hospitals became what British hospital administrators hoped they would not: spaces where imperial subjects contested and even reshaped some of the policies and ideologies of imperial rule.