One of the less popular songs from the Ranbir Kapoor-Nargis Fakhri starrer Rockstar is Katiya karun. The song is a lament of a woman whose husband has gone far away and she spins yarn waiting for him. Similar songs of longing and separation abound in Punjab. But many don’t know that the trigger for such songs was the First World War.
When the men went to war, and nearly 6,00,000 men from undivided Punjab did sign up, the women were left behind. For many, the wait never ended; for many, the wait ended but their husbands returned as changed men; many women married their brothers-in-law thinking their men were dead, only to see them return after four years; and for many, despair turned into derangement.
The Great War saw the service of 1.3 million Indians, but 74,000 never made it back home. For their families, war was something they couldn’t quite understand. And with the men—the sole earning members in most families—gone, the women suddenly found themselves shouldering all sorts of responsibilities.
The situation was not very different in Europe where women took up all sorts of odd jobs and even those involving hard manual labour. On returning from war, many men found themselves unemployed with their women replacing them in the work force. In Britain, this led to all sorts of problems with many war veterans protesting and disrupting commemoration events.
In India, the women also had to contend with illiteracy and social taboos while fending for their families. A 1916 play on recruitment by Satish Chandra Chattopadhyay, Bengali Platoon (Bengali Polton), highlighted the plight of women grappling with rising household expenses and the pain of parting with their boys.
One of the characters has a son named Kebla who goes to the war. She and her daughter-in-law fret about rising prices in a scene.
Not only have the price of clothes gone up, but matchsticks, soap, thread, combs, even needles have become expensive. Listen, can anyone tell me the connection between the war and the price of needles?
Kebla’s mother asks.
Mother, don’t you understand? May be the sahibs are pricking needles into the bodies of their enemies; that’s why the price of needles has gone up.
Her daughter-in-law replies.
This may sound like a very paternalistic view today (and maybe it was indeed that way), but the plight of the women is reflective of the situation on the ground at that time.
In Punjab, with the recruitment officers taking away the men, the women would follow them for long distances before returning heartbroken—Women often objected to their sons, husbands or brothers joining the military. In Chattopadhyay’s play, Kebla’s mother is upset that her son had signed up for the Indian Army for Rs 11 pay and the signing bonus of Rs 50.
What horrors have befallen me! I see that the crocodile has invaded my house first. Is it to undo me that the burnt faces (offensive slang for the English) came to the village?
Kebla's mother cries.
Look, don’t call these eminent people such awful names.’ She goes on: ‘What shan’t I? I will, a hundred times. First the burnt faces invade our country, and now they are trying to raid my ladder.
Kebla objects:
Haryana historian, Professor K C Yadav says the recruitment officers shamed the men who refused to volunteer in front of the women—a sure shot tool to guarantee recruitment in a deeply patriarchal society. This had a parallel in Britain where recruitment propaganda was carried through posters and skits, where a young child asked her father, ‘Daddy, what did you do in the war?’, or college girls booed at boys for still staying in their dorms.
When the Indian soldiers served in Europe, they were amazed by the openness in the society. It were the gori mems (white women) who influenced them majorly. Many letters sent by the sepoys to their families talked about the need for Indian women to be educated and utilise their time better. When many of these men returned home, they ensured that their daughters went to school too.
But women from the more privileged classes, while not suffering in the war or from it, did a lot for the care of those who suffered. There were some Indian women who took to the streets of London to raise funds for the treatment of Indians wounded in the war. Sarojini Naidu was one of them, who also wrote a poem, The Gift of India for all those Indians who served and died in the Great War. This is one of the many underrated Indian contributions to the Great War.
First Published by The Times of India.