Two unusual studies conducted on Sikh POWs by German Scientists in the areas of Language and Anthropology.
This poignant portrait was captured by an anonymous prison guard who collated the complete set of images in a private picture album. They were later published in Germany as part of a postcard series illustrating the various types of Indian soldier—Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims, Brahmins and Gurkhas—held captive by the Germans.
Their experiences in captivity reveal much about Germany’s preoccupation with theories of scientific racism, aimed at bolstering its war-time propaganda effort among Indian and North African soldiers of the British and French armies. Interned in special camps for ‘colonial soldiers’, Indian troops were encouraged to rise against their colonial masters and switch their allegiance to the German cause. While this propaganda effort failed to produce any substantial results, one of the camps particularly attracted the interest of a group of German scientists.
RACIAL ELEMENTS AMONG THE SIKHS
In the Halfmoon camp in the city of Wünsdorf, near Berlin, seventy-six Jat Sikh prisoners of war were subjected to various scientific research projects, including a project to study their racial characteristics based on the eighteenth-century theory of craniometry (skull-measuring), to explore the racial differences between the Sikhs under review.
SOUND ARCHIVE OF THE WORLD
In a unique alliance between the military, the scientific community and the entertainment industry, these Sikh detainees were also involved in another ambitious project to create a sound archive of ‘all the peoples of the world’.
The project was carried out by the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission. Founded in 1915 and comprised of over thirty scientists from the fields of linguistics, musicology and anthropology, the aim of the commission was to systematically record the different languages and the music of all those interned in German prisoner-of-war camps. Under the technical direction of Wilhelm Doegen, a trained linguist who headed the commission, 1,650 recordings of languages were made.
Among the Sikh voices was Mal Singh. Born in 1892 in the village of Ranusukhi in Ferozepur District, Punjab, he entered the British Indian Army as a soldier and set foot on European soil for the first time at the age of twenty-four. Here are the words Mal Singh spoke into a phonographic funnel on 11 December, 1916:
There once was a man. This man came into the European war. Germany captured this man. He wishes to return to India. If God has mercy, he will make peace soon. This man will go away from here.
Today, Mal Singh’s recording is one among hundreds of voices of colonial soldiers of the First World War comprising the basic stock of the Berlin Sound Archive, today located at the Humboldt University, Berlin.
BRITISH LIBRARY SOUND ARCHIVES
Copies of these recordings are held in the British Library. Each record has a 'Personalbogen' (speaker details) with entries in German for name, age, brief details about schooling and occupation in civilian life, religion, mother tongue etc. There is then a set of transcripts, including a text in what is listed as 'Gurmukhi alphabet', a transliteration using Roman alphabet and a translation into German.