A French 'Tiger' in India

George Clemenceau was French PM (and War Minister) during WWI
Bodhisattvas in his table

French President Emmanuel Macron recently stated that the commemoration of the 100th year of the end of World War I between the Allies and Germany was an occasion to promote a ‘recast multilateralism’. The presence in Paris on November 11 of the representatives of all those who participated in the War, including Germany, demonstrates this choice.
France has not forgotten India’s participation; Paris recently offered India a piece of land to construct the ‘Indian Military Memorial’ for Indian troops at Villers Guislain, in Northern France. The memorial comprises a bronze Asoka emblem and a plaque, honouring the Indian soldiers who died in the War.
But there is more to the relations between India and the War; read the story below and you understand the meaning of multilateralism between France and India.

A Tiger among Politicians
Whenever one thinks of the Great War, a name comes to mind, Georges Clemenceau.
Born in 1841 in Vendée, the hotbed of the monarchists during the French Revolution, Clemenceau came from a lineage of physicians. His father never really practiced, but he was attracted by political activism, following the ‘Radicals’, a Party not enamoured of Catholicism.
Though a lifelong atheist, Georges had an interest in religious matters from the early age. He joined politics as an anti-clerical, often fighting the French Catholic Church, strongly believing that that the Church and the State should strictly be kept separate.
From November 1917 to January 1920, he was the Prime Minister of France and he played the central role in the victory of the allies; he then became known as ‘Père la Victoire’ (‘Father Victory’) or ‘Le Tigre’ (‘The Tiger’), as he always favoured a total victory over the German Empire and militated for the restitution of Alsace-Lorraine to France. In 1919, he became the main architect of the Treaty of Versailles at the Paris Peace Conference.

Clemenceau at Guimet Museum (behind the central pillar), c. 1890

Clemenceau the philosopher
There is another aspect to George Clemenceau; he was a great humanist, thinker, traveler and lover of India and its philosophies.
Mao once said: “The philosophers have so far only interpreted the world, the point is to change it." Clemenceau first changed the world by giving Victory to the allies, while being a philosopher at the same time.
This reminds me of Sir Francis Younghusband, the British ‘imperial adventurer’. During his stay in Lhasa in 1904, he had become fond of the Ganden Tripa, the senior-most Tibetan Lama. In spite of the political difficulties and their personal backgrounds, they often sat together to discuss religion and philosophy. They developed a very close rapport. On his return to England, he became a great adherent of the philosophy of Ahimsa.
But in the case of Clemenceau, it was not a ‘sudden conversion’ as for Younghusband, he had spiritual inclinations from his early years in politics.
Already in July 1885, he gave a speech in the French Parliament: “Inferior race the Hindus? With this great refined civilization that is lost in the mists of time!” He also spoke of the Buddhist religion which later migrated from India to China, but left “this great efflorescence of art of which we still witness today the magnificent remains.”
He would always remain fond of Buddhism.

Clemenceau sitting with Agvan Dorjiev
the 13th Dalai Lama's emissary in Europe, in 1898

The Guimet Museum
Clemenceau was involved in the creation of the Guimet Museum in Paris. He was close to Emile Guimet, a rich industrialist from Lyon and a passionate about oriental religions. He traveled all over Asia and once back in France, he decided to create "a didactic place dedicated to Buddhism, and, in general, to religions around the world.” Guimet Museum was inaugurated in Paris in 1889; later Clemenceau even attended Buddhist ceremonies organized by the museum.
On February 21, 1891, when a puja in honor of the founder of the Shinshu sect was performed by two Japanese monks, Clemenceau sat in the front row; a journalist asked the future Prime Minister: “Now, you can’t stop us going to the Mass?” Clemenceau quipped: “What to do, I am a Buddhist!”
For him, Gautam Buddha was at the top of the thinkers’ hierarchy; he is indeed "the greatest preacher of peace and fraternity that has appeared in the world". Clemenceau called him the ‘sublime monk’, who preached the love of his neighbor and this without proclaiming the existence of an almighty God. He greatly preferred Buddha to Jesus, probably due to the omnipresent Church in Catholicism at that time in France.
The Tiger also liked the fact that Buddhists did not proselytize. In 1905, he told L'Aurore, a French newspaper: “With what impatience do I wait for the day when we will see Buddhist and Shinto missionaries coming to Marseilles who will come and try to convert us!”
From 1917 to 1920, when he served as Prime Minister and War Minister, he kept several statuettes of bodhisattvas placed prominently on his desk.

Clemenceau in Ellora, a few months after retiring as French PM (1920-21)

Clemenceau the Traveler
But Clemenceau knew that it was not enough to read books about philosophy, he decided to immerse himself into the cultures he was studying.
Months after his retirement, at the age of 80, he embarked on a long journey to Egypt, Sudan, Ceylon, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Burma and finally India.
As soon as he arrived in Calcutta on December 5, 1920, he fell extremely sick; worried doctors advised his immediate repatriation to France.
The Tiger was not going to listen to the orders of the doctors: “Whether I die in Calcutta or in Paris, on a Wednesday or a Saturday, it does not matter, but you would not want me to come to India’s door and then return to France without having visited India. Either I will die or I will visit India!”
He recovered and went on a long journey in India starting by Benares.
He often wrote to his friend, the great impressionist Claude Monet: "I have come to Benares to take the most prodigious bath of light ... A large clear blue river, with an imposing curve of white palaces, which fades in the powder of dawn.” He tried to attract his friend to India: “if my name was Claude Monet, I would not like to die without having seen Benares.” He wrote about “a humanity crazy with expressive colors” which animates India: “I do not want to go to heaven if Benares is not there,” he asserted, adding that even: “the incomprehensible cult of these sacred cows, coming in the morning to eat the flower malas with which I was garlanded,” finds an explanation.
Clemenceau was very fond of Asoka, the King who renounced violence, he wrote: “The reign of the great Asoka is one of the purest human glories,” an antithesis of what Father Victory had been known for during the Great War.

Clemenceau in Elora (1920-21)

'Le Soir de la Pensée' (The Evening of the Thought)
On his return from India, Clemenceau worked on his philosophical testament Le Soir de la Pensée, which shows not only his great erudition, but also his deep understanding of India’s philosophical thought.
Several chapters mention India; one is entirely consecrated to The Philosophies of India. Clemenceau admitted having experienced a ‘delicious joy’ in discovering the Ramayana, the Vedas and the Buddhist scriptures.
He acknowledged that he had grasped only the superficial aspects of the Indian Thought: "I do not know by what excess of daring I try to summarize aspects and developments of the Hindu thought in a few lines. [But] this subject holds me and leads me.”
Elsewhere he says: “By her Vedic hymns and her great poems, we find unexpected resemblances to Greece. …The genial feature is that it does not formally reject any affirmation which could bring some doubt to the proclaimed belief.” He continued: “The cosmogonies of India cannot be counted. All contradictions accumulate, without ever losing confidence, always ready to assimilate everything.”
Hundred years after the Armistice, this aspect of Father Victory should be remembered, though his philosophical views never interfered in his political decisions as one of the main actors of the Great War.

(I am grateful to my colleague Christine Devin for her numerous inputs in this story)

When Indians fought for France

La Somme

Here is an article which I published in Geopolitics last month.

2014 is a special year. It will not only mark the 60 years of the infamous Panchsheel Agreement with China, which in many ways precipitated the war with China 8 years later, but also the centenary of World War I which started in July 1914.
It is an important date for India too.
More than 130,000 Indian troops, including many Sikhs and Gorkhas fought in France and Belgium during the bloody conflict during which more than 9 million people died; a quarter of the Indian contingent never returned to their native provinces. It is even recorded that during the battle of Neuve-Chapelle in France in March 1915, the Sikhs regiments lost 80% of their men.
Some of the French battlefields where Indian soldiers showed their bravery and dedication to a cause which was not theirs, are still part of the History of France.
A hundred years later, the French government has decided to pay homage to all those who fought and lost their lives in the cold and cruel trenches of the Somme and other battlefields of the Great War; a documentary film titled ‘100 Years’ will show the sacrifice of Subedar Manta Singh who saved the life of his British companion before losing his own life. Born in Jalandhar district in 1870, Manta Singh belonged to 2 Sikh Royal Infantry. One day, crawling through a no man’s land, he and his friend Henderson came under German fire. Manta somehow managed to push his companion under a wheelbarrow, saving the Brit’s life; unfortunately, fatally wounded in the process, he died soon after.
The film written and directed by Paris-based Punjabi writer Vijay Singh, is sponsored by France Television and the French Embassy in India. It uses rare photographs, film footages, and press clippings to show that many Indian soldiers won the appreciation of the French.
More than 1,000 such initiatives should mark the commemorations of the Great War, during which France will try to pay back a small portion of its debt to the Indian jawans.

A few years ago, David Omissi, a military historian wrote Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldier’s Letters, 1914-18 (Palgrave, 1999). This edited collection of letters sent by Indian soldiers to their family in India (and their replies) is deeply touching.
Places such as Ypres, La Bassée, Neuve Chapelle, Festubert, Loos and Givenchy will remain engraved forever in the military history of India and France. So many jawans of the 9 Bhopal Infantry, 15 Ludhiana Sikhs, 47 Sikhs, 57 Frontier Force, 58 Frontier Force, 59 Frontier Force, 89 Punjabis, 107 Pioneers, to quote a few, valiantly fought for a country that they did not know; they could not even speak the language.
For most of the Indian soldiers in the Allied forces, it was their first trip to Europe (and for many, their last as they ended being buried on the front).
As he arrived in France, an Indian soldier wrote to his family: “What is Paris? It is heaven!” He soon discovered that the trenches were Hell.
Another bewildered jawan described Paris: “To-day I saw a museum in which all the living fishes of the world were kept in boxes of water and a magnificent palace which cost millions of pounds.” He must have visited Versailles Palace.
Another one in transit in London explained: “in the train that goes under the earth … a strange and wonderful experience — they call it the underground.”
Nobody had even heard of a ‘Tube’ in his native Punjab.

Though some of the Indian soldiers could not read or write, they were allowed to dictate letters to their families and the answers were read out to them.
On September 19, 1916, one Farrier Major Khan wrote from Punjab to Wali Mahomed Khan of the 18 Lancers who was on the front: “I have heard all about your amours with the French women and how the officers forbid it. I can quite imagine how, if you know enough of the language, you have a great time and try to make yourself out a trustworthy person. I have no doubt you are always meeting the French people. It is a great pity that you never write any real account of the war in France.”
They did not have a ‘great time’; further their missives were heavily censured. Interestingly, it is why one can still see them at the India Office Record (IOR) in London. The website of the British Archives explains: “At the beginning of the War, in response to an Indian 'revolutionary' distributing 'subversive' literature, a Censors office, under Captain E.B. Howell, was set up in Boulogne [near Paris] to censor Indian out-going as well as in-coming letters, both from the front and from the hospitals in England.”

The 'tranchées'

he IOR is right when it affirms that the ‘Censored Mails’ are of great sociological importance and provide vivid testimonies of how Indian soldiers and civilian personnel saw the War, France, and Britain.
The Indian jawans knew that the letters would be checked: “We are not allowed to write about the war. What they put in their papers is all lies; we have only captured 400 yards of trenches. The war is very hard”, one soldier said.
Farrier Major Khan ‘wisely’ advised his relative: “No doubt your officers read the letters. But cannot you devise any way of dodging them? I will tell you what to do. When you write a letter, on one page write in invisible ink made out of lemon juice and I will read everything. If you cannot get this, take some lime which has not been wetted and grind it up and mix it with water and write and I shall be able to read it all.”
The story does not tell us if Wali Mahomed tried the trick.
In a rare description of the operation in September 1916, one Daya Ram of the Jat Regiment told Kalu Ram in Ambala: “I went into the trenches on August 7 and returned on August 28. Some of our men were wounded. I am not permitted to give any fuller details. The battle is raging violently, and various new ways of fighting have been introduced. The ground is honeycombed, as a field with rat holes. No one can advance beyond the trenches. If he does so, he is blown away. Mines are ready charged with explosives.”
Daya Ram continues his vivid account: “Shells and machine guns and bombs are mostly employed. No one considers rifles nowadays, and serviceable rifle ammunition is lying about as plentifully as pebbles. At the trenches, thousands of maunds of iron, representing exploded shells, lie on the ground. At some places corpses are found of men killed in 1914, with uniform and accoutrements still on. Large flies, which have become poisonous through feasting on dead bodies, infest the trenches, and huge fat rats run about there.”
By that time, most of the surviving Indian troops had been sent to a more clement climate in Turkey, only a few Indian cavalry regiments were still on the front.

1 Gurkha

Jemadar Indar Singh belonged to one of them. He explained to Chattar Singh who lived in Ludhiana district: “I am off for a cavalry attack on the September 15 [1916]. It is quite impossible that I should return alive because a cavalry charge is a very terrible affair, and therefore I want to clear up several things which are weighing on my heart at present. Firstly, the sharp things you have written to me have not annoyed me. Don’t be grieved at my death because I shall die arms in hand, wearing the warrior’s clothes. This is the most happy death that anyone can die.”
This is perhaps what made the Indian soldier so special to the Empire.
On October 7, 1927 France officially acknowledged India’s participation in the World War and expressed its deep gratitude. A memorial in Neuve-Chapelle was inaugurated by Ferdinand Foch, Maréchal de France and Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies who paid a vibrant homage to the Indian soldiers. The old Marshal told Indian representatives: “Return to your faraway Oriental country, bathed in sun, and make the entire world know how your countrymen have soaked the cold soil of northern France and the Flanders with their blood; and how with an exemplary courage, they have delivered France. They fought hand-in-hand with a redoubtable enemy, also, tell everybody in India that we shall look after the tombs of your soldiers with the same devotion that merits our own dead.”
During the centenary celebrations, France and Britain should express their deepest appreciation for the role of Indian soldiers, though it is not clear for which cause, the Punjabis, the Baluchs or the Gorkhas fought so bravely. This is often the cases in wars; years later, the reasons for conflict becomes blurred.
And as an irony of history, the Germans and the French are today great pals trying to build Europe together. It is undoubtedly better that way.

On the occasion of the 100 years, most of these letters have become available online on the site of the British Library and the EU’s archive project, Europeana. It is worth having a look.