The Voice of the Voiceless

This project adopts an interdisciplinary approach to investigating the experiences and recorded words of Indian prisoners of war (POWs) held in German camps during World War I. It will study both sound recordings and handwritten materials in South Asian languages produced by the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission between 1915 and 1918 and now preserved in the sound archive of the Humboldt University in Berlin and the archive of the Berlin- Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The aim is to complete a sociological, cultural, historical, anthropological, and literary study of the sources in the context of their time so as to be able to appreciate the place they deservedly occupy within the cultural and intellectual history of South Asia during the war. This project seeks to understand the positionality of South Asian POWs in Germany and reconnect them to historical trends back home. As a first step, the task of listening and relistening to, transcribing, and translating the POWs texts will prepare the primary sources for analysis. In the second stage, a mixed strategy will be used, involving three main critical approaches throughout: (1) Close readings of the POW texts, linking them to Sanskrit and contemporary Nepali, Hindi, Bangla, and Urdu literature from the first half of the twentieth century (printed and oral). (2) Building on this foundation, this study will go on to investigate the extent to which the following hypothesis holds true: that the POWs, though largely uneducated, figured as both consumers and transmitters of oral and printed texts, and, as an extension of that, of the region`s intellectual and cultural history. (3) Through an in-depth analysis of recorded voices and handwritten texts, the project seeks to bring back into focus suppressed aspects of the prisoners pain and memories, along with the social, cultural, and linguistic landscapes they inhabited before the war. It will thus analyze the interplay between these primary sources and broader cultural phenomena, establishing connections between audio recordings, handwritten materials, printed books, and popular cultural practices. Among other things, the research will link these sources to South Asian literary traditions, testing further the hypothesis that the soldiers recordings were influenced not only by their communal customs, cultural activities, and oral traditions but also by the subcontinent`s thriving print culture and elite cultural milieu. This analysis will be framed within the intellectual history of South Asia, with particular attention to print capitalism, cultural imperialism, and cultural hegemony, and will provide a compelling picture of pre-partition India and Nepal. The project aims to understand how themes of confinement, isolation, uncertainty, identity, memory, and resistance are conveyed, while also investigating what measures POWs took to maintain their sense of identity, community, and agency, that is, to adapt to the conditions of captivity. Finally, the study will explore the impact of gender, race, and class on the prisoners narratives and articulations of their culture.