(In)visible Intimacies: Relations Between Indian Soldiers and White Women in British World War I Literature
Abstract
This is an examination of intimate relationships between young Indian soldiers and older European women during World War I as sites of hospitality contextualized by a wider problematization of interracial intimacy. A growing, multidisciplinary body of scholarship has fixed on the military migration of non-white colonial labour to Europe during World War I.
In the contact zone of the Western Front proliferating interactions between colonial soldiers and labourers and white women were heavily scrutinized. Sexual desire, empathy, curiosity, and commerce were the drivers that created a range of relationships across race lines, from marriage to sex work to platonic relations as between nurses and patients.
These personal and private interactions between non-white men and white women were the subject to the apparatus of imperial discipline that problematized and controlled such encounters, from curtailing the freedom of movement of soldiers and labourers to the prohibition of interracial and interfaith marriage. Hospitality and welcome shown in the private sphere was thus subject to a public climate of inhospitality.
However, intimate relationships between Indian sepoys and rural French matrons whose homes they were billeted in did not rouse imperial moral panic. Wartime accounts reveal touching, empathetic relationships between these sepoys and the women whom they came to see as surrogate mothers.
I argue that these relationships were not targets of imperial control but were instead highlighted in British wartime literature that in turn erased the widespread fear over sexual relationships between white women and brown sepoys.