IMPERIAL AMNESIA: RACE, TRAUMA AND INDIAN TROOPS IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR

World War I was a watershed both for military psychiatry and British imperial mobilization. This article investigates how clinicians, psychiatrists, and British and Indian officials responded to the psychological crises of their South Asian servicemen, of whom over 1.4 million served between 1914 and 1918. It argues that mental health treatment in the Great War served as an experimental site where officers and soldiers contested ideas about race, pain, and the body, revealing the flexibility of racial ideologies. Army and medical personnel routinely mobilized racial taxonomies in order to diagnose - and, at times, ignore altogether - non-white servicemen's mental disorders. As the mental health crisis among British and Indian Army soldiers expanded, some experts began to acknowledge psychological illness among Indian troops and rethink the interplay of therapeutic care and racial identity. This insight was willfully forgotten in the interwar decades, an amnesia facilitated by medical authorities' investment in pre-war ideas of 'martial races' and ethnic difference. © The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2018.