The age of catastrophe devoured lives from many parts of the globe. Yet the ‘Great War’ also occasioned new encounters and experiences. Never before had ten thousands of non-elite South Asians moved across Europe. About two thousand of them, mostly sailors and soldiers who hailed from villages in Bengal, Nepal, the Northwest Frontier and Punjab, were held for years in German prison camps. They attracted the close attention of army officers, diplomats and secret agents, of emigrant revolutionaries like Har Dayal and Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, of German artists, academics and industrialists. The captives made sense of these unusual encounters in their own ways. This volume approaches their difficult engagements from various angles. It introduces and makes available rich German archives as yet unknown to the non-German speaking world.

[Source: Orient Blackswan]