Social History of Medicine Vol. 0, No. 0 pp.

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‘These Curly-Bearded, Olive-Skinned Warriors’:
Medicine, Prosthetics, Rehabilitation and
the Disabled Sepoy in the First
World War, 1914–1920
Aparna Nair *

Summary. The sepoy had always been a central figure in colonial governance and policing and had
played important roles in both world wars. Focusing on World War I, this article explores the
sepoys’ corporeal experience of the war through their own letters. The article explores how the war
had a catalytic impact on colonial perceptions of and responses to disability in the colony and how
medicine, prosthetics and rehabilitation came to be seen as the ‘promise’ made by the Crown to
Indian soldiers for their service. The article also examines the introduction of cultures and institu-
tions of rehabilitation into the colony in the form of the Queen Mary Technical Institute and
explores the intersections of race, empire and disability at these sites of rehabilitation.
Keywords: disability; race; medicine; rehabilitation; WWI

Even in far-off India, the trade of automobile mechanics takes hold of the imagina-
tions of the natives. It must be a curious sight indeed to see India’s disabled sons
operating an automobile or studying the intricacies of mechanics in the shops that
are operated at Queen Mary’s Technical school in Bombay. These curly-bearded,
olive-skinned warriors will not be left on the highways to beg, after they have
served their country, but will be trained for useful trades in which their physical
handicaps do not prevent them from competing with able-bodied men.1
As millions of demobilised and disabled soldiers flooded back to their homes from the
multi-fronted First World War, the figure of the disabled veteran captured the public
imagination. Newspaper reports across the world described the range of facilities, chari-
ties and institutions that emerged in order to heal and rehabilitate the disabled soldier
and return them to ‘normalcy’ and economic productivity. In these public accounts of the
disabled veteran, the Indian sepoy was often presented as both counterfoil and comple-
ment to the more familiar English, American, Australian and Canadian soldiers.2 One
such newspaper report lauded the benevolence of the colonial state in not abandoning
its Indian veterans to fend for themselves and connected the project of rehabilitating

* History of Science, University of Oklahoma-Norman, Room 622, PHSC, 601 Elm Avenue, Norman, OK, 73019,
USA. E-mail: aparna.nair@ou.edu
I work on disability history in the Global South and also work on ethnographic examinations of chronic illness in
contemporary South India. I teach a range of subjects, including disability, race, imperialism, public health and
medical histories.

1 2
Tulsa Daily World, 15 December 1918, 2; Anaconda ‘Sepoy’ was an Anglicisation of the Persian word
Standard, 12 January 1919, 11. ‘sipahi’ or soldier.

© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine.
doi:10.1093/shm/hkz002
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disabled sepoys to industrial economies and modern technologies. Indeed, for the anony-
mous author, disability incurred in the service of the British Empire was constructed as a
catalyst that permitted Indian veterans to transcend what were perceived as the limits of
Indian society, avoid the (inevitable) perils of mendicancy and facilitated the sepoy veter-
an’s transition to industrial, ‘modern’ subjectivities.
The sepoy’s role in the First World War was indeed substantial, as were other Indian
inputs towards the war effort of money and materials. In a 1917 speech to the British
parliament, Lord Hardinge, previously Viceroy of India, described these contributions as a
heavy drain on the colony which he said, had been ‘bled absolutely white during the first
weeks of the war’.3 Over one million Indians, including over 621,224 combatants and
474,789 non-combatants, travelled overseas between August 1914 and December
1919, serving in places as diverse as France, Belgium, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Gallipoli,
Palestine, Sinai and East and West Africa.4 Despite their numbers, it is noticeable that, as
Das pointed out, sepoy veterans were initially marginalised in South Asian ‘nationalist-
elitist’ historiography and within the metropolitan memories of the Great War.5 Recent
work by scholars from a range of fields has rehabilitated not only just the Indian sepoy
but also the Tasmanian Aboriginal soldier, Te Hokowhitu A Tu, Algerian and Tunisian sol-
diers, Jamaican volunteers and Ottoman soldiers within the broader historiography on
the Great War.6 The focus on the sepoy has been particularly rewarding: David Omissi’s
work has restored the voices of Indian soldiers struggling with the First World War, while
Andrew Jarboe, Mark Harrison and Ana Carden-Coyne traced in detail how injured
Indian soldiers were perceived and treated while in Europe and how medicine became a
part of the promise made to Indian soldiers for their service.7 Much of this work still

3
Manchester Guardian, 4 July 1917, 5.
4
Shrabani Basu, For King and Another Country: Indian
Soldiers on the Western Front, 1914–18 (London:
Bloomsbury, 2015); Santanu Das, ‘Imperialism,
Nationalism and the First World War in India’, in
Jennifer Keene and Michael Nieberg, eds, Finding
Common Ground: New Directions in First World War
Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 81.
5
Santanu Das, ‘Indians at Home, Mesopotamia and
7
France, 1914–1918: Towards an Intimate History’, in
Santanu Das, ed, Race, Empire and First World War
Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), 84; Rosie Llewellyn–Jones, ‘In Memory of
India’s Fallen’, History Today, 2010, 60, 6–7.
6
For instance, Timothy C. Winegard, Indigenous
Peoples of the British Dominions and the First World
War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011);
Philippa Levine, ‘Battle Colours: Race, Sex and
Colonial Soldiery in World War I’, Journal of Women’s
History, 1998, 104–30. Ashley Jackson, ed. The British
Empire and the First World War (London: Routledge,
2017); Basu, For King and Another Country; Richard
Smith, Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War:
Race, Masculinity and the First World War
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004);
Das, Race, Empire and First World War Writing; Ray
Costello, Black Tommies: British Soldiers of African
Descent in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015); Thomas DeGeorges, ‘Still be-
hind Enemy Lines? Algerian and Tunisian Veterans af-
ter the World Wars’, in Heike Liebau et al., eds, The
World in World Wars: Experiences, Perceptions and
Perspectives from Africa and Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2010),
519–46; Hikmet Ozdemir, The Ottoman Army: 1914–
1918: Disease and Death on the Battlefield (Salt Lake
City: University of Utah Press, 2008).
David Omissi, ed., Indian Voices of the Great War:
Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–1918 (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1999); Ana Carden-Coyne, The Politics of
Wounds: Military Patients and Medical Power in the
First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014); Andrew Tait Jarboe, ‘Propaganda and Empire
in the Heart of Europe: Indian Soldiers in Hospital and
Prison, 1914–18’, in Richard Fogary and Andrew
Jarboe, eds, Empires in World War I: Shifting Frontiers
and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict (New York:
I.B. Tauris, 2014); Mark Harrison, The Medical War:
British Military Medicine in the First World War
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Samuel
Hyson and Alan Lester, ‘“British India on Trial”:
Brighton Military Hospitals and the Politics of World
War I’, Journal of Historical Geography, 2012, 38, 18–
34.
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maintains its focus on Indian sepoys on the Western Front, the UK, Africa and the Middle
East and less is known of the corporeal experiences and economic trajectories of these
soldiers once they returned to their homes.8 A similar lacuna is perceptible in disability
histories of the Great War, too, which have also largely emphasised the experiences of
European, North American, Australian and New Zealand soldiers.9
This article situates the sepoy within the discourses on the body and medicine in the First
World War and examines medical, institutional and rehabilitative responses to the
wounded and disabled Indian soldier in the colony. The article begins by using medical
reports, censuses and censors’ reports to examine sepoys’ perceptions and corporeal expe-
riences of war and disability.10 This article traces the valorisation of the figure of the
wounded/disabled sepoy in the public imagination in both the metropole and the colony,
while also provoking anxieties about policies and provisions for the disabled sepoy in the
colony. The most tangible responses of the colonial state to the disabled sepoy were the
state-supported production of prosthetics and the emergence of rehabilitative cultures and
infrastructures. The article argues that the war precipitated some transformations in medi-
cal technologies and provisions for Indians, specifically the increased emphasis on the use
of X-ray technologies, ambulances and orthopaedic medicine. Most notably, the war saw
the establishment of residential institutions for the rehabilitation of disabled Indian veterans
that were the first of their kind in the colony. Despite the transplantation of cultures of re-
habilitation to India, this article argues that the exigencies of wartime also revealed the of-
ten threadbare, reactive character of colonial medicine and the non-existent technological
infrastructure for people with physical impairments prior to the war. In addition, the trajec-
tories and outcomes of rehabilitation were influenced by race, space and imperial anxieties.

The Sepoy at War

Only those men who have been rendered unfit by wounds or sickness will see the
Punjab, not the others. But what can one do? It is Pramatha (God’s) favour that is on
the world, everything is at his mercy . . . Parameshwar (God) knows what will happen.11

8
Hilary Buxton, ‘Imperial Amnesia: Race, Trauma, and
Indian Troops in the First World War’, Past & Present,
2018, 241, 221–58. Hilary Buxton’s article is a nota-
ble exception and a fascinating and timely examina-
tion of how trauma was racialised in Indian troops
during the Great War and in the interwar period.
9
See, for instance, Jeffrey S. Reznick, ‘ History at the
Intersection of Disability and Public Health: The Case
of John Galsworthy and Disabled Soldiers of the First
World War’, Disability and Health Journal, 2011, 4,
24–27; Mike Mantin, ‘Coalmining and the National
Scheme for Disabled Ex-Servicemen after the First
10
World War’, Social History, 2016, 41, 155–70; David
Gerber, ed., Disabled Veterans in History (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2000); Beth Linker,
‘Shooting Disabled Soldiers: Medicine and
Photography in World War I America’, Journal of the
11
History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2011, 66,
313–46; Jen Roberts, ‘The Front Comes Home:
Returned Soldiers and Psychological Trauma in
Australia during the First World War’, Health and
History, 2015, 17, 17–36; Andrea Gerrard and
Kristyn Harman, ‘“Lives Twisted out of Shape!”
Tasmanian Aboriginal Soldiers and the Aftermath of
the First World War’, Aboriginal History, 2015, 39,
183–201; Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home:
Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–
1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001);
Beth Linker, War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World
War I America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2011); Julie Anderson, War, Disability and
Rehabilitation in Britain: ‘Soul of a Nation’
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).
This article focuses primarily on physical disabilities
resulting from injury or other trauma (injuries that re-
quired physical and occupational rehabilitation) and
does not examine other categories such as blindness
or long-term chronic illness resulting from service.
British Library (BL), IOR/L/MIL/5/825/4, Report of the
Indian Censors (RIC), June 1915–August 1915,
Sepoy Sudar Singh to Sepoy Musteram, May 1915.
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By the beginning of the 20th century, sepoys had been fighting and dying in the volun-
teer armies of the English East India Company and for the British Crown for more than
two centuries.12 Sepoys had fought French soldiers in Egypt and had ensured British vic-
tory over their mutinying sepoy compatriots during the Rebellion of 1857, in addition to
being a significant part of imperial policing and military actions in many colonies.13 When
the First World War began, Indian soldiers and non-combatants naturally became a sig-
nificant part of British imperial efforts in a conflict that surpassed all that had come be-
fore in terms of the nature, scale and the intensity of casualties in battle. Between
October 1914 and December 1915 alone, 138,608 Indians served in France and fought
at the battles of Ypres, Festubert, Givency, Neuve Chapelle, Second Ypres and Loos.14
Sepoys were even more significant in the Mesopotamian theatre, where 588,717 com-
batants and non-combatants served.15
Compared to the greater visibility of British soldiers in the records of the war, data on
the precise nature and extent of wounds and injuries sustained by Indian soldiers and other
participants in the war are relatively elusive.16 However, existing medical and census statis-
tics do bear out the toll of war on sepoys’ bodies. The total number of deaths in the Indian
army from August 1914 to 31 December 1920 amounted to 62,056 soldiers of all ranks;
while 66,889 soldiers of all ranks in the Indian army were wounded.17 Among the sepoys
that landed at Marseilles alone in late September and early October of 1914, the rate of
wounding and physical trauma in just 3 months of fighting was close to 25 per cent.18
Imperial census reports for British India allow us to assess rates of invaliding in the Indian
army. In the decades before the First World War, invaliding rates fluctuated between 6
and 8 per thousand but from 1915 onwards, this escalated rapidly to a rate of around 25–
28 per thousand.19 Similarly, the ratio of hospital admissions for this population had also
increased from pre-war levels of 530–540 per thousand to as high as 856 per thousand by
1918. The ratio of ‘constantly sick’ soldiers in the census returns also escalated dramatically
during the war from around 21 per thousand before the start of the war to 41 per thou-
sand by 1918.20 In fact, the physical costs of this war were so high that even the Viceroy
was compelled to argue that India was ‘being exploited by the War Office because they
find that they can maintain Indian troops abroad without those extremely objectionable
questions in Parliament which would be asked if they were British and not Indian forces’.21

12
See Kaushik Roy, ed. The Indian Army in Two World Australia’, Australian Historical Studies, 1998, 29,
Wars (Leiden: Brill, 2012); David Omissi, The Sepoys 49–67. Bourke argued much the same for Australian
and the Raj (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994). soldiers, suggesting that there were clear disparities
13
Aparna Nair, ‘“An Egyptian Infection”: War, Plague in the attention paid to wounds and disabilities based
and the Quarantines of the English East India on race and the origin of the soldiers.
17
Company at Madras and Bombay, 1802’ Hygeia Statistics of the Military Effort, 350.
18
Internationalis, 2008, 8, 7–29. John W. Beresford Merewether and Frederick Smith,
14
Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire The Indian Corps in France (New York: E.P. Dutton
During the Great War, 1914–1920 (London: War and Company, 1918).
19
Office, 1922), 777. Census of India, 1921, Sickness, Mortality and
15
Santanu Das, ‘Imperialism, Nationalism and the First Invaliding in Indian Army (Excluding Officers), http://
World War in India’, in Jennifer Keene and Michael dsal.uchicago.edu/statistics/1910_excel/1910.187.
Nieberg, eds, Finding Common Ground: New XLS.
20
Directions in First World War Studies (Leiden: Brill, Ibid.
21
2011), 81. Chelmsford to Montagu, 19 December 1919, quoted
16
Joanna Bourke, ‘The Battle of the Limbs: in Keith Jeffery, The British Army and the Crisis of
Amputation, Artificial Limbs and the Great War in
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Several months later, the Government of India would again caution the British government
against using Indian troops as grist for the mill of the war.22
The First World War was certainly an unprecedented corporeal experience for the
sepoys despite their military experiences across the Empire. This war was distinctive for
the widespread use of machine guns, high explosives, aerial bombardment, tanks and
gas as well as the bitter and bloody deadlocks accompanying trench warfare and was,
therefore, certainly outside sepoys’ usual experiences of conflict. The specific conditions
of trench warfare on the western front had left soldiers vulnerable to potentially disabling
shrapnel and gunshot wounds, while collapsing trenches and falls were equally danger-
ous with soldiers presenting in hospitals with crushed backs and legs as their bodies were
crushed under falling sandbags used to shore up trenches.23 As Biernoff pointed out, the
conditions of the war contributed to a high prevalence of facial wounds and subsequent
disabilities.24 Simply handling poison gas, let alone direct exposure to gassing, would
have resulted in a range of symptoms, including terrible burns, blindness or in the worst-
case scenario, a slow and painful death as the lungs were burned out.25 In addition, a
slew of infectious diseases held their sway over soldiers in the trenches, including typhus,
enteric fever and tuberculosis.26 Soldiers from the Indian army were inexperienced with
the harshness of winter in the trenches of Europe—frostbite, bronchitis, rheumatism and
pneumonia were all likely consequences of being continually immersed in cold, muddy
water.27 On the other hand, the soldier fighting in the Middle East and in Africa was ex-
posed to a different set of corporeal challenges: here, soldiers were likely to experience
the debilitating effects of heat and sunstroke.28 Aside from the immediate morbidity and
mortality from chronic dysentery and cholera, malaria and tuberculosis were also likely to
contribute to long-term chronic weakness and recurring illness on this front.29
Furthermore, Indian troops were also vulnerable to nutritional deficits in long-term cam-
paigns owing to the uncertainties of their field diet. For instance, the Mesopotamia
Commission found that 11,000 Indian troops had died of scurvy.30 Aside from these
physical injuries and diseases, the psychological trauma that often accompanied service

27
Empire, 1918–22 (Manchester: Manchester BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/824, Admission and Discharge Books
University Press, 1984). of the Indian Military Depot Hospital, Milford–on–
22
Antony J. Stockwell, ‘The War and the British Sea, Hampshire.
28
Empire’, in John Turner, ed., Britain and the First BL, IOR/L/MIL/17/5/2016, Cole, Report.
29
World War (London: Routledge, 2014), 36–53. Rachel Constance, ‘In the Shadows: Contextualizing
23
BL, IOR/L/MIL/17/5/2402, Col Bruce Seton, An Cholera Outbreaks in the Indian Army During the
Analysis of 1000 Wounds and Injuries Received in Great War’ in Roger D. Long and Ian Talbot, eds,
Action, with Special Reference to the Theory of the India and World War I: A Centennial Assessment
Prevalence of Self–Infliction, Kitchener Indian (London: Routledge, 2017).
30
Hospital, Brighton, 1915. Report of the Commission Appointed by Act of
24
Suzannah Biernoff, ‘The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in Parliament to Enquire into the Operations of War in
First World War Britain’, Social History of Medicine, Mesopotamia (London: H.M. Stationery Office,
2011, 24, 666–85. 1917), 71; Mark Harrison, ‘The Fight against Disease
25
Tim Cook, No Place to Run: The Canadian Corps and in the Mesopotamia Campaign’, in Peter Liddle and
Gas Warfare in the First World War (Toronto: Hugh Cecil, eds, Facing Armageddon (London: Pen
University of British Columbia Press, 1999), 3. and Sword, 2003), 475, 477.
26
Robert L. Atenstaedt, The Medical Response to the
Trench Diseases in World War One (Newcastle-upon-
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011).
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in the frontlines also had the potential to contribute to long-term impairment among
sepoys.31
Perhaps equally as revealing as medical and military records about the disabling nature
of the war were sepoys’ letters from the front.32 Alternately, poetic, plaintive, stoic and
fearful, the majority of letters conveyed family anxieties, prayers, requests for money,
troop movements and the more mundane events of everyday life. Soldiers drew on famil-
iar religious metaphors to describe the war: while Muslim sepoys invoked the ‘Karbala’ to
refer to the violence they experienced, Hindus consistently referred to the epic battles of
the Mahabharata. As one soldier wrote: ‘Do not think that this is war. This is not war. It
is the ending of the world. This is just such a war as was related in the Mahabharata
about our forefathers.’33 While the letters vary dramatically in affect—some appeared to
have come to terms with their situation and sought to reassure their families back in
India, many more captured the toll of war on the human body. Trench warfare was de-
scribed in vivid and graphic terms: as an endless stream of sleepless nights, a deluge of
bullets and shells, ‘which fell thicker than drops of rain’ and a ‘river of blood’.34 The bitter
cold and snow was another recurrent theme in soldiers’ letters: ‘In the trench, the snow
rises from the feet to the neck and the feet and hands are frost-bitten’.35 A recurring
theme in these letters was the fear and helplessness soldiers felt as they confronted the
relentless shelling and chemical warfare for the first time. For instance, Ramnath Singh
wrote that the Germans had ‘. . . a machine gun which scatters bullets like water . . .
(and) a shell full of poison from the vapour of which one dies’.36 Letters also capture the
soldier’s awareness of the disabling potential of this war: as one wounded sepoy wrote
to his brother in India: ‘Four thousand (Indians) had lost arms or legs and many have lost
their sight’.37 Many letters also interpreted disability through the framework of karma:
‘. . . all this is the return God gives for what we have done in a former birth’.38 Sepoys
were also clearly aware that wounds alone did not suffice to be invalided back to India.
The nature of the disability had to be irreversible and significant—usually the loss of an
arm or leg or blindness’.39 As one soldier put it: ‘[Only] the man who has lost a leg or an

31
Wellcome Library, RAMC/739/19, Report of the War
Office Committee of Enquiry into ‘Shell-Shock
(London: Her Majesty’s Office, 1922), 8–10; Buxton,
‘Imperial Amnesia’, 221–58.
32
Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers
and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy
(New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); Susan
Vankoski, ‘Letters Home, 1915–16: Punjabi Soldiers
Reflect on War and Life in Europe and their
Meanings for Home and Self’, International Journal
of Punjab Studies, 1995, 2, 43–63. Others have used
these letters to examine selfhood, caste, race and
sepoys’ relationship with the Raj and their position
within the Empire.
33
BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/2, RIC, March 1915—April
1915, 5; BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/4, RIC, June 1915–
August 1915, From Sangare Jide to Sangara Ram,
May 1915; Omissi, Indian Voices, 32.
34
BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/2, RIC, March 1915–April 1915,
ASR to a Friend, 19 March 1915; BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/
825/4, RIC, June 1915–August 1915, Nand Lal to
Jairam, June 1915; BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/828/2, RIC,
December 1914–July 1918. Rev. Father Cry to Dr.
Brother Moulman, 2 April 1918.
35
BL, IOR/L.MIL/5/827/6, RIC, Dec 1917–March 1918,
Bhagat Singh to Harnam Singh, 16 January 1918;
IOR/L/MIL/5/825/4, RIC, June 1915–August 1915,
Fakir Khan to Ghulamdin, 11 June 1915; BL, IOR/L/
MIL/5/825/1, RIC, December 1914–April 1915, X.Y
to Relative; Ibid., From a Sikh to a Friend in India, 29
January 1915.
36
BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/4, RIC, June 1915–August 1915,
Ramnath Sing to Singh Sahib, May 1915.
37
Omissi, Indian Voices, 36.
38
BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/4, RIC, June 1915–August 1915,
From Jodh Singh to Sahib Singh, 4 June, 1915.
39
BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/4, RIC, June 1915–August 1915
Sepoy Sher Khan to Sepoy Alam Shah; Pirzada to
Saman Khan and Hasan Shah, 3 June 1915.
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arm returns to India. My ankle is broken. I was hit twice. My life is safe, but my leg is
useless’.40
Yet, the letters also conveyed a curious tension in sepoy attitudes towards disability:
while on one hand, they feared disability and its consequences, some sepoys simulta-
neously implicitly acknowledged that disability was the price they had to pay in order to
return to their homes. Both this fear and ambiguity are evident in this account: ‘I have
been wounded twice, and now this is the third time I am being sent to the trenches. The
English say it is all right. How can it be all right! As long as one is unhurt, so long they will
not let one off. If Parmeshwar allows, I will escape, but the butcher does not let the goat
escape’.41 Another wrote wistfully: ‘I am not one of those who are to return to India.
Only those go to India who have but one arm or one leg. This is the fact, Germany has
made us a fine lot of specimens. It makes one cry, and even laugh, to see them’.42 These
letters also convey how some sepoys experienced and perceived their own disabilities
and the emotional aftermath of their injuries. Subedar Jodh Singh, for instance, wrote
about being struck by a shell in his left shoulder, resulting in a ‘great wound, but now it
is healed. However, alas, it is useless’.43 Lying in the New Milton Convalescent Home,
Raghunath Prasad wrote despairingly: ‘My legs are absolutely useless. I am always pray-
ing to God and saying, “Oh God, it would have been much better, if I had died, for what
can I do in India in such a crippled condition?” What a contrast there is not between the
state of hope in which I came to Europe and what I am now! All my relations advised me
not to go, but I volunteered’.44 Much like Prasad, Lance Naik Phina Ram penned a letter
about his impairment from his English hospital bed just as he was about to be shipped
home. ‘I am absolutely crippled in the leg’, he wrote, ‘and wherever I go I shall be
avoided’. His anxieties about his disability permeate the missive; he worried that he
would not just be avoided but be cast out when he returned: ‘they (his family) will even
turn me out at home . . . I do not know whether to tell the people at home what has hap-
pened to me or not. I am very anxious. If they do not welcome me at home, I am thinking
of going on a pilgrimage and living by myself on what government may give me’.45

The Sepoy in Hospital

As soldiers began returning to India from the war, representations of the wounded sepoy
in contemporary print media acknowledged their loyalty and service to Empire. Not only
were they brave, but they also were presented as ‘glad . . . to them belongs the glory of
having done their “bit” in fighting the common enemy’.46 Viceroy Lord Hardinge was
eager to ensure a positive narrative among returning Indian soldiers: this was seen as
important for British ‘prestige’ in India and the ‘attachment the lower classes have to the
Sirkar’.47 Medicine became a part of the assurance made by the Sirkar to the Indian

40 44
Omissi, Indian Voices, 38. BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/826/1, RIC, December 1915–January
41
‘Letter from Ragbir Singh to Gajander Singh, 8 April 1916, Phina Ram to Lachman Brahman, 28
1915’, in Omissi, ed., Indian Voices, 53. December 1915.
42 45
‘Letter from Sepoy Baghal Singh to His Brother, 6 Ibid.
46
April 1915’, in Omissi, ed. Indian Voices, 52. Times of India (henceforth,TOI), 17 May 1917, 8.
43 47
BL, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/4, RIC, June 1915–August 1915, Hardinge to Lawrence, April 14, 1915, EUR/MSS/
From Jodh Singh to Sahib Singh, 4 June 1915. F143/73, cited in Hyson and Lester; TOI, 16 January
1919, 8.
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soldier, a message that the Crown had not forgotten their service and also had significant
narrative potential for the British and colonial administrations.
For Indians wounded in European line units, the role of medicine has been well docu-
mented. Once wounded, they were usually evacuated by ambulance wagons, trains and
hospital shops to base hospitals restricted to Indian soldiers situated in Southampton,
Brighton and at the Lady Hardinge Memorial Hospital at Brockenhurst.48 Between 1914
and 1915 alone, 14,514 wounded Indian soldiers were moved to Indian hospitals in the
UK run by the doctors and surgeons of the Indian Medical Service.49 By 1915, a thousand
soldiers of the Indian army had passed through the doors of the Kitchener Hospital in
Brighton alone.50 In British and Indian hospitals treating wounded sepoys, the ‘objects
aimed at the treatment of gunshot wounds would have been, in order of importance:
first, to save the patient’s life; second, to save the patient’s limbs; and third, to save the
patient’s limbs with function unimpaired, so as to render him fit for service’.51 Nearly half
of all gunshot wounds in the hospital from February to November 1915 did in fact return
to duty; while only 28 per cent of the soldiers were invalided out of the service compared
to the 23 per cent remained in the hospital and were transferred on demobilisation.52
But, by 1917, the bulk of the Indian army was engaged in the Middle East and Africa.
Soldiers wounded on these fronts were transferred first to hospital ships in the Persian
Gulf to be treated and then returned to the frontlines. If seriously wounded, they were
transported by steamer from Basra across the Arabian Sea to Bombay and Karachi.53
Once disembarked, British soldiers were segregated from the Indian soldiers and the
British wounded soldiers were taken to the Military Hospital at Colaba.54 After being dis-
charged from the hospital, British soldiers were sent to convalescent depots or homes in
Bombay, Nasik and Dharwar.55
The ‘sick and wounded’ Indian soldiers were initially housed in the Lady Hardinge war
hospital, which was supported in part by the Indian Soldiers’ Fund and the Imperial
Indian Relief Fund.56 As the flood of returning wounded soldiers increased, the Lady
Hardinge Hospital was soon unable to manage the influx. In response, civil hospitals in
the region and charitable hospitals (such as the Sassoon Hospital, the Free Mission
Hospital and the Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy Hospital) were also opened up to admitting sick
and wounded Indian troops.57 Existing buildings were requisitioned by military authorities
and retrofitted into military hospitals. In Bombay, for instance, the Bomanji Dinshaw Petit

48 50
BL, IOR/L/MIL/17/5/2402, Bruce Seton, An Analysis of BL, IOR/L/MIL/17/5/2402. Seton, An Analysis.
51
1000 Wounds and Injuries Received in Action, with BL, IOR/L/MIL/17/5/2016, Cole, Report.
52
Special Reference to the Theory of the Prevalence of Ibid.
53
Self–Infliction, 1915; BL, IOR/L/MIL/17/5/2384, Indian Maharashtra State Archives (MSA), General Files,
Force for Europe, India Office Military Department, 6 3649: CN 1366, 1917.
54
September 1914; Das, Race, Empire and First World TOI, 10 December 1914, 7.
55
War Writing, 16. MSA, General 4420, 1080, 1917; MSA, General
49
George Morton-Jack, The Indian Army on the 4612, CN 129, 1917.
56
Western Front: India’s Expeditionary Force to France MSA, General 4524, CN 1529, 1917; The Times, 14
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 290; August 1919, 7.
57
Andrew Thompson, Britain’s Experience of Empire in MSA, General 3529, CN 1080; General, 3586, 1916;
the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University General 3586, CN 1198, 1916; General 3748, 1589,
Press, 2014), 279. 1916–17.
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Parsee General Hospital in Cumballa, in southern Bombay became the Cumballa War
Hospital in 1917.58
The war also underscored the need for better emergency medical transport systems in
the colony, a need that was met by the St. John Ambulance Association and the Red
Cross, supported by philanthropy and with state support. Indeed, across the world, the
First World War had a dynamic influence on both the St. John Ambulance order and the
Red Cross, and India was no different.59 At the end of the 19th century, the need for
first-aid training and ambulance work in India had been raised to the St John
Hospitallers. The latter had already been active in caring for the indigent, poor, infirm
and disabled in Cairo, Jerusalem and other colonies and by 1910 had a limited foothold
in South Asia.60 Before the war, the St. John Ambulance Brigade mostly provided training
in first aid, home nursing and home hygiene in Bombay and in Ceylon and was largely
supported by contributions from local elites.61 But when the war started, the St. John
Ambulance set up war hospitals, ran ambulances and trained personnel. Similarly, the
Red Cross society ran 14 motor ambulances that served the front and war hospitals in
India in addition to a ‘small fleet of motor ambulance boats’ that plied wounded soldiers
back to South Asia across the Persian Gulf.62 The Indian Red Cross also provided trained
personnel to serve on land and sea ambulances.63 Both the St. John Ambulance and the
Red Cross became the recipients of donations in cash and kind made by private citizens,
Indian elites and voluntary organisations.64 For instance, before 1914, the Red Cross had
a limited presence in India with pre-war assets only amounting to a few hundred rupees,
but the war resulted in a flood of very public charitable donations and the mobilisation of
trained personnel in a number of roles.65 For Indian princely states in particular, these
contributions were intended as tangible evidence of their fealty to the Empire.
The war also gave a fillip to the emergence of orthopaedic medicine in British India, in the
shape of the short-lived Orthopaedic Institute established in the hill-station of Dehra Dun in
October 1917.66 Intended solely for maimed Indian soldiers returning from the overseas
forces, this institute was funded by the state under war expenditure.67 The bare-boned insti-
tution was staffed by a single military sub-assistant surgeon, and soldiers arriving at the
Institute received specialised orthopaedic treatment to facilitate their recoveries from war in-
juries and retrieve the maximum possible use of their limbs.68 Rehabilitation efforts at the
Orthopaedic Institute included electrical and massage treatments.69 The Dehradun Institute

58
BL, 17th Stationary Hospital Gazette. Cumballa War
Hospital, 1 (January 1917).
59
Sarah Glassford, Mobilising Mercy: A History of the
Canadian Red Cross (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2017), 81–129.
60
TOI, 27 October 1899, 5; NAI, Medical Branch, April
1910, 64, PART B, Memorandum on the Indian
branch of the St. Johns Ambulance Association; NAI,
Home Department, Police Branch, May 1910, 33–46,
PART B.
61
TOI, 4 May 1910, 8; Ceylon Observer, 4 February
1889, 19.
62
Ibid.
63
Ibid.
64
TOI, 7 Oct 1914, 7. For instance, by the end of
September 1914, the Simla YMCA donated 3,000
rupees to the Indian St. John Ambulance Association,
and Bombay Presidency donated twice as much.
65
Ibid; TOI, 26 June 1915, 11.
66
NAI, Home Department, Medical Branch, January
1920, File Numbers 121–22.
67
Ibid.
68
BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/18481, Army Department, No. 4 of
1919. Although India Office records hint that this
Dehra Dun centre also was intended to train soldiers
in ‘some useful trade’, records in the National
Archives in New Delhi instead reported that the
Institute only provided physical rehabilitation.
69
NAI, Home Department, Medical Branch, File
Numbers 121–22, January 1920.
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was seen as a short-term measure to the exigencies of the war and closed almost as soon
as the war itself ended in early 1919. However, more permanent orthopaedic hospitals for
‘purely military patients’ were eventually established at Cawnpore, two at Ambala, three in
Karachi, four in Dehradun—including the Lady Chelmsford Special Red Cross X-Ray and
Electro-Therapeutic Hospital established by the St. John Ambulance Association.70 Equipped
on ‘modern lines’, these institutions were intended as therapeutic spaces for disabled sol-
diers to recover from their injuries—a transition between the hospital and the rehabilitative
institution.71 The Lady Chelmsford institution was restricted to patients requiring electrical
and X-ray treatment for the ‘localisation of deep-seated foreign bodies’, presumably shrap-
nel.72 Electropathy, hydropathy, gymnastics, remedial exercises and massage treatments
were offered both at the Orthopaedic Hospital in Dehradun and in Mussorie.73
Reporting on medical provisions for wounded and disabled Indian soldiers in newspa-
pers was often laudatory, framing these provisions as responses befitting the sepoys’
contributions in the war effort. However, despite the rosy picture of medical provisions in
contemporary newspapers, contemporaneous assessments such as the Mesopotamia
Commission instead condemned medical responses to wounded soldiers in India, which
revealed a military medical infrastructure groaning under the pressures of the war.74
Focusing only on provisions for the British sick and wounded arriving in India, the
Mesopotamia Commission commented that the outbreak of war, the ‘whole standard of
medical establishments, of hospital equipment, and of field ambulances in India has been
for years past much below that in vogue (sic) in the British army’.75 The war revealed the
racial and structural fault lines within the colonial medical establishment in India. Colonial
medicine had a significantly urban, metropolitan bias since it had developed in response
to the specific priorities and needs of colonial enclaves, armies and commerce and, there-
fore, was ill-equipped to deal with the needs of wounded Indian soldiers returning in
large numbers.76 The director of the Military Medical Services in India also commented
that there had only been two or three ‘up-to-date’ hospitals for British soldiers.77 Indeed,
in the wake of the war, conditions in provincial hospitals in particular were estimated to
be so poor that the Government of India proposed using the revenues of the Joint War
committee’s invested funds to further and expand the ‘usefulness of provincial hospi-
tals’.78 Such a scheme was advocated as necessary because disabled soldiers often
sought care at provincial hospitals and, therefore, could ‘result in material advantage to

70
BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/18481, No 425, File 1309, Army
Department No. 4, 1919.
71
Ibid.
72
TOI, 26 June 1915, 11.
73
New York Times, 27 October 1918, 41; Douglas
McMurtie, The Disabled Soldier (New York: The
MacMillan Company, 1919) 203–04.
74
See also Samiksha Sehrawat, Colonial Medical Care
in North India: Gender, State and Society, c.1830–
1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 2013).
75
Mesopotamia Commission, 10. Even before they ar-
rived in India, wounded soldiers (British or Indian)
had to navigate an unsanitary, inefficient medical
transport system. Hospital ships arriving in Basra
were described as festooned with ‘dried stalactites of
human faeces’ and soldiers lying in a ‘pool of dysen-
tery’. Wounded soldiers had their limbs splinted with
wood strips from whisky boxes, ‘Bhoosa wire’.
76
See David Arnold, ‘Medical Priorities and Practice in
Nineteenth-Century British India’, South Asia
Research, 1985, 5, 167–83; Mark Harrison, Public
Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive
Medicine 1859–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994)
77
BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/18481, Extract of an Army Despatch
from the Government of India, No. 14, 5 February
1919.
78
Ibid.
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disabled soldiers both before and after leaving the service’.79 The Mesopotamia
Commission also condemned the ‘campaign of (medical) economy’ as it was practised in
India.80 In 1915, for instance, the Commission reported evidence that the Colaba station
hospital was poorly equipped, lacking ‘electric fans and light’, adequate X-ray apparatus,
‘lack of sufficient air-beds, water-beds, ring pillows . . . lack of splints and other surgical
apparatus’.81 Given the racial and spatial patterns of colonial medical infrastructures, it is
fair to assume that conditions in the Indian hospitals were far worse than those for the
British soldiers. Hospitals for Indian soldiers were further hampered by resource con-
straints in addition to which sepoys were expected to provide their own bedding, cloth-
ing and food.82 The results of the Commission allied to press condemnations and
pressure from the India Office did result in concrete improvements in war hospitals across
India, as Sehrawat demonstrated.83 The results included both small-scale changes such
as ice boxes, fans and electricity in Indian war hospitals to accommodations and war hos-
pitals for Indian sepoys.84

The Sepoy and His Artificial Limb

Naim had . . . got himself fixed up in a military-run factory with clips that securely
attached his wooden arm to his stump. In the village, they marvelled at the artificial
limb and asked questions about the factory where it was made and the kind of ma-
chinery they had. They shook their heads in wonderment when Naim told them the
truth. As well as fitting the clips, they treated the wood with chemicals and applied
a special paint of a colour that almost exactly matched Naim’s natural skin. Under a
full sleeve shirt, it would take a close look, or prior knowledge, to tell one hand
from the other. Naim could not help his father with work on the land as much he
used to do in the past, although he did whatever he could—he could work a
plough, but only for so long, and he trained himself to ride as well as he ever did
before. The only thing he was unable to do was cut green fodder with a scythe,
which required the grip of both hands and, however natural-looking his left hand
was, he could not make a fist of it.85

In Abdullah Hussein’s heartfelt exploration of a land and people rent apart by Partition,
‘Udas Naslain’, the protagonist Naim is indelibly marked by the Great War after he loses
an arm and is invalided out of the army. Fictional although it is, Hussein’s story captured
in vivid detail how Indians responded to artificial limbs in the wake of the war. Indeed,
prosthetics were one of the enduring global legacies of the First World War and certainly
one of the most important steps towards rehabilitating disabled soldiers.
When the first shipments of sepoys returned to India in 1915, questions were raised
about provisions for the wounded and disabled in the colony. Indian soldiers who had be-
come disabled in ‘foreign climes’ (and their families) were not to be abandoned, one let-
ter in the Leader argued, and ‘Indian representatives must see that the cause of Indian

79 83
Ibid. Sehrawat, Colonial Medical Care, 233–41.
80 84
Mesopotamia Commission, 72. Ibid.
81 85
Ibid. Abdullah Hussein, The Weary Generations (London:
82
Morton-Jack, The Indian Army, 336. Sepoys may Peter Owen, 2014), 120–21.
have preferred their own food, in order to maintain
religious and caste boundaries and identities.
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soldiers is not neglected’.86 In the November 1915 edition of the Desh, an author asked
what measures were to be instituted for maintaining Indian soldiers who had been
completely disabled in the war.87 After the Armistice in 1919, the British Viceroy declared
‘We owe victory to those who have been crippled and maimed and blinded in the war.
We must see that they do not want’.88 The question of making provisions for the thou-
sands of soldiers who ‘lost their lives or limbs in the war . . . in the service of the Empire’
was also highlighted in state discourse more than it had ever been. The issue was raised
before Parliament, and unfavourable comparisons were drawn between the colonial
administration’s response to Indian soldiers and the nationalised and multivalent ap-
proach towards disabled British soldiers.89 Prosthetics were a part of the promise made
to disabled Indian soldiers, like medicine was to the wounded soldier. As early as 1915,
when Austen Chamberlain, then Secretary of State for India, assured certain ‘arrange-
ments for their return to their homes’.90 He had pledged an artificial limb centre in India
to wounded sepoys in Brighton and promised them ‘comfortable trains which would
take them up country’.91 In a 1916 report by Colonel Walter Lawrence of the War Office
to the Secretary of State for War that was also published in Indian newspapers, the ques-
tion of artificial limbs for maimed Indian soldiers had been raised as a necessary response
to the war.92
In the 19th century, the European and North American metropole had witnessed a
positive efflorescence of innovation in the materials, design and functionality of prosthet-
ics.93 Artificial limbs were produced using light and flexible woods, leather, German silver
and iron and increasingly drew on the technological and material transformations
brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Designers and producers of prosthetics were
fashioning lighter and more flexible prosthetics—by introducing springs into the design,
to take one example. Despite the technological innovations that transformed the pros-
thetic limb industry in the metropole, British India did not have comparable access to
these technologies. Before the First World War, the archives offer little evidence of state
investment or interest in systematically providing prosthetics for sepoys or civilian employ-
ees that had been disabled in service. The Indian Medical Gazette, for instance, did occa-
sionally mention artificial limbs, but usually as an infrequent footnote to accounts of
successful amputations.94 It was not routine practice for colonial hospitals and dispensa-
ries to dispense artificial limbs to patients, and medical accounts suggest that physicians
or private philanthropists often had to buy or make their own prosthetics using available
resources. Even at the close of the Second Afghan War, British soldiers who were injured
enough to require amputations were routinely sent to Netley to be fitted with artificial

86 93
Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms (Calcutta: Laurel Daen, ‘A Hand for the One-Handed’:
Superintendent Government Printing Press, 1918), Prosthesis User-Inventors and the Market for
208–09. Assistive Technologies in Early Nineteenth Century
87
Desh, 16 November 1915, 692; quoted in Jarboe, Britain’, in Claire Jones, ed., Rethinking Modern
‘Propaganda and Empire’, 221. Prostheses in Anglo-American Commodity Cultures,
88
TOI, 16 January 1919, 7. 1820–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University
89
The Leader, 20 April 1917, 1. Press, 2017), 93–114; Vanessa Warne, ‘Artificial
90
The Tribune, 17 July 1915, 4. Leg’, Victorian Review, 2008, 34, 29–33.
91 94
Carden-Coyne, The Politics of Wounding, 205. The Indian Medical Gazette, 1 March 1875, 10, 73.
92
The Leader, 30 August 1916, 8.
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limbs after their surgeries.95 Indian soldiers, however, did not usually have easy access to
prosthetics from the metropole. For the duration of the 19th century, the average sepoy
who had lost a limb to injury or infection would very likely have made their own artificial
limb been fitted in a local bazaar or would have gone to the village carpenter.96 Unlike the
India rubber and flexible woods utilised by the artificial limb industry in the metropole, these
functional prostheses were more likely to have been manufactured from whatever woods
were available in each region and were most suitable to the purposes. For instance, in areas
where bamboo was prolific, it was used to make a rudimentary prosthesis.97 These prosthet-
ics were likely to have been simple, inexpensive and functional if not entirely comfortable,
light or flexible. Petitions in the archives suggest that even remunerations for artificial limbs
were only approved in the rarest of instances and usually for British soldiers and employees.
This unequal access to prosthetics in the 19th century is probably most clearly demonstrated
in this incident, reported in the Pioneer newspaper in 1886. Sardha Singh, a pensioned duf-
fadar of the 9th Bengal Lancers had ‘lost his own (emphasis in original)’ wooden leg while
serving with the Hodson’s Horse brigade during the Mutiny.98 The author astringently
pointed to the unfathomable actions of a ‘paternal Government’ failing to provide Singh
with a new wooden leg nearly three decades after the petitioner had lost his own in the ser-
vice of the state. Clearly, even for sepoys whose missing limbs stood as tangible material evi-
dence of their loyalty to the British during the Mutiny, the colonial state was very unlikely to
pay for prosthetic limbs.
The First World War, however, represents a significant milestone in the history of the
technologies and production of prosthetics in India. When increasing numbers of the
Indian contingent wounded in France and treated in British hospitals required prostheses,
they were initially provided with them at both Brighton and Roehampton.99 Writing in
Urdu from the Kitchener’s Indian Hospital in Brighton, Rajwali Khan responded to his
newly fitted artificial limb:
Alas! Alas! . . . . There is nothing but my corpse left. They have cut off the whole of
one leg, and one hand too is useless. What is the use of my going to India thus? . . . .
They have given me a leg, but it is made of wood, and vile. I cannot walk. I shall start
for India in a few days . . . . There is nothing left of me. I have lost a hand and a leg.
What am I to do?100
For those sepoys wounded in Mesopotamia or sent directly to Bombay, prostheses were
provided initially through war hospitals like the Marine Lines War Hospital in Bombay and
were the financial responsibility of military authorities.101 Initially, these prosthetics were

95
Report of the Army Medical Department, Great
Britain, Volume 39 (London: Her Majesty’s
Stationery Office, 1898), 391.
96
Christopher Alan Bayly and Timothy Norman
Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia,
1941–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2005), 370.
97
George Watt, A Dictionary of the Economic
Products of India, Volume I (Calcutta:
Superintendent of Government Printing, 1889),
386. The carefully cleaned leaf sheath of the bam-
boo stalk was utilised both as a splint as well as an
artificial limb with the stump of the leg being
inserted at the open end of the bamboo.
98
The Pioneer, 2 August 1886, 1–2.
99
The Leader, 30 August 1916, 8.
100
‘Letter from Rajwali Khan to Ghulam Hussain, Sept
4, 1915’ in Omissi, Indian Voices, 98.
101
Vocational Rehabilitation of Disabled Soldiers and
Sailors: A Preliminary Study (Washington, DC:
Federal Board for Vocational Education, 1918), 263.
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supplied from England, but several cases of artificial limbs made in the UK were also
shipped from France to India.102 Imported prostheses were not viable as a longer-term
solution: not only were they expensive, but these prostheses were also believed to require
additional adjustments and repairs that would enable them to endure the heat and chal-
lenges of the Indian climate and environment.103
In response to the growing demand and cost, an institution for the indigenous manu-
facture of artificial limbs was established at Deolali in July 1916, where the army sent
soldiers with serious orthopaedic injuries.104 Simultaneously, the centre was to ensure that
not only the artificial limbs were to be built of materials and with technologies that simulta-
neously reflected the advances in the metropole but also were designed such they were
‘serviceable and suitable to Indian conditions and to the wear and tear of the Indian vil-
lage’.105 Interestingly, Lawrence reported that Indians preferred artificial limbs imported
from Europe, as they suspected the quality of locally produced prosthetics. He cited the ex-
ample of one Indian officer who had been sent to Roehampton to be fitted for an artificial
leg, of which he was ‘very proud’.106 Despite these innovations, the cost of prosthetics
proved to be a significant hindrance towards the rapid dissemination of the emergent tech-
nologies. By 1918, the annual Government of India expenditure for artificial limbs
amounted to around 6,000 pounds.107 In this same year, there were discussions of import-
ing expertise from the USA to India—a ‘special man from America’—to supervise the indig-
enous manufacture of artificial limbs, suggesting that the nascent indigenous industry was
struggling to meet the demand.108 However, the plan was shelved because it would in-
crease the cost by the sum of a thousand pounds per annum.109
This surging wartime demand for artificial limbs in South Asia also elevated the profile
of private companies that designed and sold artificial limbs in India. Newspaper advertise-
ments suggest that at least two companies that sold surgical appliances, including artifi-
cial limbs in Bombay presidency: the Bombay Surgical Company and N. Powell’s.110
Established in 1891, Powell’s manufactured and sold artificial limbs and exhibited their
products in the Paris Exposition Universalle in 1900, where it received the Gran Prix.
Powell’s appears to have cornered the market and had contracts with government hospi-
tals, the Red Crescent Indian Medical Mission and with the colonial army.111 During
World War One, this company was also provided the contracts for fitting out the war
and base hospitals and hospital ships. The company also advertised in English-language
colonial newspapers, and these typically presented what appeared to be a white male fit-
ted with a prosthetic leg. He was represented seated with his artificial limb removed and
propped by his chair or depicted at work in his shirtsleeves in what appears to be a fac-
tory setting. At the same time, the war also had an impact on indigenous innovation. For
instance, in 1917, Mr. Nathumal of R. N. Oswal and company in Bombay invented a
‘combined peg leg and walking stick’, which was pitched specifically as being very useful

102 107
The Leader, 30 August 1916, 8. Queen Mary Technical Institute Library (QL), Queen
103
Ibid. Mary’s Minute Book,(QMMB) Volume I, Minutes, 21
104
Ibid. January 1918, 1.
105 108
Ibid. Ibid.
106 109
Ibid. Ibid.
110
The Spatula, October 1920, 113–14.
111
Ibid.
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to those ‘who have unfortunately lost their legs partly or cut off on account of disease or
on account of wound on the battlefield’.112

The Sepoy and Rehabilitation

In the metropole, disabled veterans of this war had propelled a rupture in the social per-
ceptions of disability more generally and resulted in the ‘birth’ of new ways of addressing
disability.113 As the war generated a flood of young, previously able-bodied and recently
disabled citizens, states and societies commenced efforts to rehabilitate these newly dis-
abled citizen-subjects and reintegrate them into the labour force.114 As early as 1915,
disabled British troops had recourse to programmes built on the realisation that soldiers
needed training and education that taught them how to adapt to their prostheses.
Roehampton was the flagship of Britain’s network of orthopaedic facilities and one
among the 16 establishments set up by British military authorities for the ‘after-careers’
of soldiers while they were still undergoing hospital treatment.115 Roehampton itself was
perceived as a ‘model for nation and empire’ in the matter of the commercial and indus-
trial training for limbless men—administrators and other observers from across Britain
and the empire visited Roehampton and took the model to their countries.116 Indeed,
the British themselves recognised that their colonial counterparts in India had fallen be-
hind in efforts to create an infrastructure for rehabilitation beyond the hospital. Reports
sent back to Britain at the end of the First World War from the Government of India con-
ceded that there had been ‘considerable delay’ in establishing institutions to treat and re-
habilitate the flood of disabled sepoys arriving on the western shores of the
subcontinent, compared to the pace of comparable provisions in the metropole.117 This
was remedied only in May of 1917 when the Willingdon Institute for Disabled Soldiers
opened in Bombay primarily through the interest of Lady Willingdon, the wife of the
British Governor-General.118 Modelled explicitly on Roehampton, the institute was per-
ceived as an extension of the biomedical provisions for soldiers returning from the front
and as a necessary initiative for soldiers newly fitted with prosthetic limbs.119 Disabled
veterans with artificial limbs were especially unlikely to be able to return easily to agricul-
tural labour, and the school was envisioned as a space to teach residents a trade to be
able to earn a livelihood. This occupational rehabilitation ensured that disabled veterans
were no longer ‘an encumbrance to their family by reason of the loss of their limbs’, but
equally, this livelihood was intended to create economically independent individuals
whose burden on the colonial state’s pension establishment was diminished.120

112 116
Tribune, 29 November 1917, 5. Maud Adeline Brereton, The Future of our Disabled
113
Henri Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, William Sailors and Soldiers (London: Knapp, Drewett and
Sayers, trans. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Sons, 1917).
117
Michigan Press, 2000), 121–91. BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/18481, Army Department, No. 4 of
114
Julie Anderson, War, Disability and Rehabilitation in 1919.
118
Britain: ‘Soul of a Nation’ (Manchester: Manchester TOI, 17 May 1917, 7. The school was later renamed
University Press, 2011). the Queen Mary School for Disabled Soldiers.
115
Jeffrey Reznick, ‘Material Culture and the ‘After- Today, it is known as the Queen Mary Technical
Care’ of Disabled Soldiers in Britain During the Institute and will henceforth be referred to as the
Great War’, in Paul Cornich and Nicholas J. QMTI.
119
Saunders, eds, Bodies in Conflict: Corporeality, Ibid.
120
Materiality and Transformation (London: Routledge, Ibid.
2014).
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Although established for veterans of the war, the school endured the end of the war as
the Indian army continued to discharge 400 disabled men annually.121 The school subse-
quently broadened their criterion for entry and aimed to attract any soldier or follower
pensioned as unfit for further service from any cause whatever.122
A committee initially headed by Lady Willingdon and comprised of other British and
Indian members, including Parsi businessmen and philanthropists, administered the insti-
tute.123 The school was financed through public and private contributions. Indeed, as the
disabled sepoy became something of a cause-celebre in the colony, the institute
itself became a popular space for local charitable organisations and elites (particularly the
princely states) to make public displays of their fealty to the Crown and support for the
war effort.124 Partial funding for the school came from the interest accruing from the in-
terest of a ten lakh endowment from the Government of India, while the buildings and
the ground used by the school were the property of the Trust.125 Support from the gov-
ernment also came in the form of rations and railway warrants for the students at the
school.126 In 1920, the school received additional support from the Indian Soldiers’ Fund
in London, which amounted to 9,000 pounds and in 2 years moved from Bombay to a
permanent campus in Kirkee.127
In the first few months of its operation, possible students were drawn from the beds of
the Marine Lines Hospital in Bombay.128 In later years, admission to the school was restricted
to men drawing injury pensions of the ‘first and second degrees’—which involved the loss of
at least one limb, with significant subsequent impairment in terms of ability to earn a liveli-
hood and degree of dependence.129 Before being admitted to these institutions, soldiers
were to be examined by a medical board that would determine the eligibility for both trans-
fer and training.130 The first soldiers at the Queen Mary Technical Institute (QMTI) included
‘Gurkhas, Pathans, Sikhs, Marathas, Punjabis and Madrasis’, some of whom had lost both
their legs ‘but are able to walk freely with artificial limbs’.131 While undergoing treatment
and instruction, soldiers were provided full pay commensurate with their rank and service for
the first 6 months of their stay at the institute.132 The schools also provided a family allow-
ance of six rupees a month, which while not excessive, was certainly better than nothing.133
By 1922–23, the QMTI was spending roughly 12,800 rupees on salaries for sepoys receiving
rehabilitation, much of which was funded by the War Office.134 The British government was
only willing to fund those soldiers who had been invalided in the Great War. In the years af-
ter the end of the First World War, sepoys who had been invalided and disabled in battles

121 129
QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 21 November 1918. QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 9 August 1918.
122 130
BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/12521, Annexure to GRO No. 735, BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/18582, Army Department Letter
10 November 1917. No. 18899, 22 December 1917.
123 131
QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, Feb 7, 1918. BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/12521, Annexure to GRO No. 735,,
Notably, the committee had included the founder 10 November 1917.
132
of the Tata business house—Jamsetji Jeejeebhoy Ibid.
133
Tata. Indian Soldiers’ Board: Report for the Year Ending
124
TOI, 14 May 1918, 8. the 31st March 1931 (Delhi: Government of India
125
Tata Steel Archives, Box No 314, File No. 178, Part Press, 1931), 9; Tai Yong Tan, ‘Maintaining the
II. Military Districts: Civil–Miltiary Integration and
126
QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 21 January 1918. District Soldiers’ Boards in the Punjab, 1919–1939’,
127
QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 10 September Modern Asian Studies, 1994, 28, 833–74.
134
1919; Minutes, 20 March 1920. BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/12521, No. 269, File 266.
128
Ibid.
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along the turbulent North West Frontier provinces were also receiving treatment at the
QMTI, but the British government refused to pay for their rehabilitation and instead insisted
that the Government of India finance these soldiers’ rehabilitation and stay.135
Capable of housing 200 soldiers, the school conducted classes in tailoring, agriculture,
knitting, oil engine driving, cinema operating, carpentering, poultry farming, motor car
driving, artificial flowers, elementary engineering, fitting and turning and electric
motors.136 Of them, the most popular was the Oil Engine Drivers’ class.137 These drivers
often earned a fair salary—amounting to around 75 rupees a month, which is substan-
tially higher than the disability pension disbursed through the Government of India.
Many of the men trained at the QMTI were enveloped back into the army: based on
their training, they were placed as tailors in regiments or at the army clothing depart-
ment.138 For instance, Gurkha regiment veteran, Bom Bahadur, whose leg had been am-
putated in the late war was trained in tailoring and reabsorbed back into the army as a
tent mender with a monthly salary of 75 rupees.139 Others who had feet or legs ampu-
tated and were trained to drive were placed as chauffeurs at the army mechanical trans-
port department. Equally important potential sites of employment were government
dockyards, ordnance factories and arsenals.

Orientalism, Race and Rehabilitation

For the colonial state, rehabilitating the disabled sepoy was both pragmatic and symbolic.
Rehabilitation represented not just the benevolence and gratitude of the imperial govern-
ment towards the ‘limbless’ Indian soldier but also embodied the primacy of Western sci-
ence and technological responses to disability. Rehabilitation was equally important as a
pragmatic way to reduce some of the long-term financial burdens of an expanding pen-
sion establishment. Disability itself was tied to the loss of the ability to earn a living and
subsequently impeded the economic status and mobility of entire families. Disabled
sepoys were considered to be ‘robust and healthy’ apart from the loss of their limbs.140
Attempts at treating and rehabilitating these returning wounded and disabled soldiers in
order to restore their economic independence were, therefore, pitched as ‘the greatest
humanitarian work that has ever been attempted in India’.141 For instance, rehabilitation
was estimated to be able to add between 20 and 100 rupees a month to disabled soldiers
above their pensions if they stayed the course and completed the training.142
Rehabilitation was, thus, constructed as the necessary complement to the pension sys-
tem; the latter represented ‘not the amount of the sufferer’s loss, but that fraction of it
which it is said that the nation can “afford” to pay’.143
Whatever provisions the QMTI may have made for rehabilitation, it is worth underlin-
ing that it had a considerably limited capacity and could cater to perhaps a couple of hun-
dred inmates at a time. The likelihood that the school was able to provide adequately for

135 140
Ibid. TOI, 17 May 1917, 7.
136 141
BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/12521, Annexure to GRO No. 735, TOI, 29 September 1917, 10.
142
10 November 1917. BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/12521, Annexure to GRO No. 735,
137
QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 15 February 1918. 10 November 1917.
138 143
BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/18446; Vocational Rehabilitation. TOI, 8 February 1917, 8.
139
QL, QMTI Annual Report, 1950–51.
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the care of the tens of thousands of disabled soldiers is, therefore, small. Consider, for in-
stance, that only a little over 1,500 soldiers had passed through the QMTI and received
training in the various trades between 1917 and 1949 in total.144 In the sanitised and
glorified version published in newspapers, the roles of rehabilitative institutions were
likely magnified beyond their actual impacts on the lives of disabled sepoys. The institu-
tion was publicised as the material embodiment of imperial benevolence and apprecia-
tion for sepoy participation—in newspapers as far away as the USA—where an
anonymous author in the New York Times commented on how surprising and unusual
the establishment of an ‘up-to-date school’ in ‘far-off India’ where her ‘disabled fighters
are taught . . . trades to make them self-supporting’.145 Indeed, newspaper narratives
completely elided the struggles to actually get soldiers to commit to the 6-month period
of training, which is evident in the archives of the QMTI itself.
For instance, there appears to have been a need to advertise and ‘induce’ sepoys to at-
tend the QMTI.146 Authorities certainly appear to have struggled to attract disabled sol-
diers to training classes.147 By 1918, the government was advertising the institute by
circulating and distributing illustrated posters and pamphlets printed in all vernacular lan-
guages in depots and regiments across the region.148 District committees and local
Soldiers’ Boards were also apprised of the institute’s work and were urged to directly
contact disabled Indian soldiers already on wound or invalid pensions in their districts
through the pension rolls.149 In ‘up-country centers’, new district committees were estab-
lished; partly because of the difficulty involving in ‘inducing . . . disabled soldiers already
on pension’ to undergo the course of training offered at the School.150 As an additional
enticement to disabled sepoys across the vast spaces of British India, Soldiers’ Boards
were authorised to issue railway warrants for free travel to and from the school.151
Consistently, medical practitioners and the colonial state found that wounded soldiers
who arrived in Bombay and Lahore often summarily left for their homes after being
treated for their injuries at the various war hospitals.152 The Indian sepoy was variously
presented as emotional, irresponsible, imprudent, intransigent and profligate. The United
Provinces Soldiers Board reported that the disabled soldier was not capable of planning
for the long-term ‘management’ of their impairments.153 Rather direly, the Board com-
mented that being temporarily ‘full of money’ through wound pensions and disability
reimbursements, disabled soldiers did not understand that the ‘lean years are coming
sooner than they imagine’ and that learning new skills were necessary to adapt to their
impairments.154 But a more careful interpretation of this apparent ‘resistance’ is neces-
sary. Very often, veterans struggled to manage providing for their families while staying
at QMTI being trained, despite reassurances that the state would provide them with fam-
ily allowances and limited residential facilities for families.155 Taking up the rehabilitation
courses offered by the QMTI was particularly difficult for those who lived far away from

144 151
TOI, 11 January 1949, 9. BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/12521, No. 269, File 266. Army
145
New York Times, 27 October 1918. Department, Delhi, 20 March 1924.
146 152
QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 21 January 1918. The Leader, 16 November 1919, 9.
147 153
QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 8 July 1919. Indian Soldiers’ Board, 9.
148 154
QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 7 February 1918. Ibid.
149 155
Ibid. Ibid, QL, QMMB, Volume I, Minutes, 4 June 1918;
150
QL, QMMB, Volume I, 15 February 1918. Minutes, 9 August 1918.
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Pune, even with the enticement of free transport to the institute. There also appears to
be little acknowledgement of either the considerable physical discomfort or inconve-
nience of travelling to the institute overland from villages and towns as far flung as
Nepal, Madras and Punjab. Even if the railway warrants were accessible to soldiers, these
journeys would have been extremely uncomfortable and possibly painful for sepoy veter-
ans who were adjusting to new physical impairments.
The colonial administration, however, consistently interpreted the sepoys’ hesitation to
report for rehabilitation and training as (yet another) symptom of the fatalism supposedly
unique to the sepoy. Notions of race certainly informed and shaped the perceptions of
disability and rehabilitation among Indian soldiers. For instance, Colonel Seton, the direc-
tor of the Kitchener Indian Hospital in Brighton, commented that Indian soldiers in the
hospital were characterised by an ‘Oriental fatalism’ in their approach to their injuries.156
Such fatalism, he contended, was one of the main reasons why the hospital needed an
orthopaedic department. The Indian injured, he argued, also risked becoming perma-
nently disabled through ‘sheer neglect of co-operation by the patient with the sur-
geon’.157 Seton stated that rehabilitation was necessary as a counterpoint to the
tendency of the Indian soldier who, ‘. . . . through carelessness or fatalism, or a desire not
to recover, has converted his slightly wounded hand or leg into a permanent claw hand
or permanent limp’.158 Similar narratives of ‘fatalism’ were also applied to sepoys in India
when they hesitated or refused to attend rehabilitation at QMTI or at the blind schools in
Bombay and Lahore, as rehabilitation was a ‘new thing and no doubt incredible’.159
What is more likely is that these newly disabled sepoys may simply have found more
comfort in familiar surroundings. These discussions also underscore that when it came to
the colonial establishment, there was a marked lack of familiarity or ease with local cul-
tures around and constructions of disability that may well have influenced local responses
to rehabilitation. One more plausible reason provided by the state for soldiers’ reluctance
to seek training involved caste and its relationship to occupation. Caste prejudices may
have proved a particular impediment for sepoys who were drawn from ‘martial castes’,
who had deep seated objections towards learning trades that could have threatened
their caste status.160 What is interesting is that disabled soldiers in the European metro-
pole also evinced the same reluctance to avail of rehabilitation. The French Minister of
Education, for instance, spoke at the Inter-Allied Conference of the Study of Professional
Re-education in 1917 and commented that disabled soldiers refused to report for ‘re-
education professionelle’ offered at several institutions because they were ignorant of
the results possible in the schools or that they would lose their pensions during the period
of re-education, while others believed that ‘the fact that they have wounded gives them
a right to employment by the state’.161 Some French veterans accepted whatever

156 160
BL, IOR/L/MIL/17/5/2016, Colonel Bruce Seton, A Ibid.
161
Report on the Kitchener Indian Hospital, Brighton, Lt. Colonel Sir A Griffith Boscawen, Report on the
1916. Inter–Allied Conference for the Study of Professional
157
Ibid. Re-education, and Other Questions of Interest to
158
Ibid. Soldiers and Sailors Disabled by the War (London:
159
BL, IOR/L/MIL/18481, Army Department No. 4, His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1917), 7.
1919, 10 January 1919.
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employment they received, while others despaired altogether of being able to participate
in any kind of manual labour.

Concluding Remarks
Long central to colonial governance and policing, the sepoy also made significant contri-
butions in the First World War. Sepoy experiences in the trenches and frontlines of this
conflict had predictable and dramatic impacts on their bodies and minds, which are per-
ceptible both in medical reports and casualty statistics, but also through sepoys’ letters.
These sources reveal a curious ambiguity about disability—on the one hand, they feared
what war could do to their bodies, but, on the other hand, they also acknowledged that
it was only through permanent, serious disability that sepoys could escape the war.
The First World War I (WWI) also marked a significant departure in colonial attitudes
and policies to injury and disability among sepoy populations, in contrast to previous dec-
ades. When British soldiers were wounded in India and invalided out of the service, they
were returned to the UK and sent to the Chelsea Hospital, which offered residential care
for the disabled and indigent veterans of the numerous wars fought by the armies of the
Empire.162 Such practices or institutions did not exist for Indian soldiers, who usually
returned to their villages after retiring or invaliding out with a wound pension. As the
First World War progressed, although, the disabled sepoy could no longer be simply dis-
patched with a pension. Attempts at treating and rehabilitating these returning wounded
and disabled soldiers were the colonial establishment’s efforts to restore their economic
independence as a panacea for pension anxieties that had were already acute at the end
of the Second Afghan war but had been exacerbated with WWI. Rehabilitation had the
potential to teach new skills that would allow the disabled colonial subject to earn an in-
dependent livelihood and, thus, supplement pensions.163 The Great War also contributed
to an unprecedented and sharpening focus on producing and distributing ‘modern’ pros-
thetics locally for disabled sepoys. However, evidence does suggest that medical, pros-
thetic and rehabilitative provisions for disabled sepoys lagged behind provisions available
to soldiers in the metropole.
It would be a mistake to read the British interest in rehabilitation and equipping sol-
diers with artificial limbs purely as imperial gratitude or benevolence—it was also a born
of deeply pragmatic imperial logics. The British were well aware that the ‘spectacle of
wounded and sick men in Hospital clothes will have a very depressing effect in India, and
a very bad effect on recruiting’.164 Equally relevant in shaping both medical and institu-
tional responses to the wounded sepoy returning from the fronts of this war was the cri-
sis posed by demobilisation—which coincided with the Spanish flu pandemic and with
the tides of nationalism in the colony.165
The QMTI especially came to be perceived as the most concrete expression of these
motives, as a site for producing ‘useful’ colonial subjects, but was equally was seen as an
important modernising influence on those who passed through its doors, as it

162 165
The Pioneer, 5 May 1895, 8. Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State: Military,
163
BL, IOR/L/MIL/7/12521, Annexure to GRO No. 735, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–
10 November 1917. 1947 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005), 98–187.
164
TNA, WO 32/5110, 15 June 1915, quoted in
Jarboe, ‘Propaganda and Empire’, 212.
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transformed sepoys into workers who ‘fit’ into the industrial colonial economy. The dis-
abled body of the sepoy was constructed here as an extension of the oil engines, looms,
cars and machines they operated. Rehabilitation was also conceived as re-enabling dis-
abled soldiers’ bodies and transforming them using scientific methods into productive,
‘efficient and well-disciplined’ colonial citizen-subjects.166 Untrained, the bodies of dis-
abled veterans were not only believed to become an encumbrance to families and to so-
cieties but also had the potential to serve as a powerful reproach to the colonial
government if the disabled sepoy began to swell the population of mendicants and beg-
gars who had always been a thorn in the side of the state. In addition, these institutions
were additionally intended to serve as space for psychological and emotional support, to
improve the morale of these ‘despondent men’ and to ‘restore self-confidence’.167 These
centres could ‘convince them (the disabled soldiers) that they can be useful citizens in
spite of their disability’.168

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Ravi Ahuja, Sara Scalenghe, Kim Nielsen, Mike Rembis and Radhika
Gupta for their comments and assistance over the several months it took to write this
article.

166 168
TOI, 30 October 1919, 9. Ibid.
167
TOI, 20 December 1946, 10.