BackThe singing sepoys
A BBC radio programme brings alive meticulous German recordings of Indian soldiers from World War I
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At first glance the black and white photograph looks ominous. In the foreground a small group of soldiers—most of whom look like wiry, swarthy sherpas—gaze into the camera. They seem uneasy, but not quite afraid. Indeed, one of them leans on the wall casually. Watching over them is yet another soldier, but he has the upright bearing and smart uniform of a man in charge. He is quite clearly not one with the others. He is seated casually on a table, and just visible is the handle of a sword that rests on his thigh.
But it is the scene in the background that is particularly disturbing. One of the sherpas stands apart from the rest, in between two formally dressed Caucasian men. One has his arm around the much shorter man in the middle and seems to be pushing the soldier’s face into some kind of conical contraption. As he does this, the other Caucasian man holds up a sheet of paper in front of the wretched man.
What terror is this? An execution in progress? Are each of the cowering Asians being led away to be murdered one by one? Are they being gagged? Poisoned?
In fact the conical contraption is one of the oldest voice-recording devices in the world. And the short soldier, a Gorkha from the British army, is being encouraged to read off the square sheet of paper so that his voice can be recorded on to delicate wax or shellac cylinders.
Earlier this year, Priyath Liyanage, of the BBC’s Sinhala Service in London, came across this photograph in the archives of the Humboldt University of Berlin. The photograph is a remnant of a remarkable project undertaken by the Germans during World War I. The project and its archives would eventually inspire Liyanage and BBC producer Mark Savage to go on a journey to India. The radio documentary based on this journey, The Ghostly Voices Of World War One, will be broadcast on the BBC World Service on Sunday.
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As the war dragged on, hundreds of prisoners of war slowly began funnelling into Germany. According to Andrew D. Evans’ book Anthropology At War: World War 1 And The Science Of Race In Germany, 625,000 prisoners were transferred to camps in the German empire in just the first six months.
“Anthropologists took special note of this development," Evans writes, “because among the long columns of men marching into German PoW camps were thousands of soldiers from the colonial armies of the French and British." African and Asian troops in particular interested German anthropologists deeply. And they realized that the camps were a “rare opportunity to study non-Europeans on European soil". The RPPC was one of the projects devised to study these strange new people from Africa and Asia.
From 1915-18, scientists working with the RPPC would travel from camp to camp, recording the voice samples of soldiers. Soldiers were asked to sing songs, tell stories and simply speak in whatever language they could. Some sang village songs, others spoke about their war experiences, and yet others appear to have read out propaganda texts.
I recently met Liyanage and Savage at London’s New Broadcasting House complex, the nerve centre of the BBC’s multimedia global network, to talk about the RPPC recordings and their documentary.
Liyanage says that while the “scientific" purpose of the RPPC was to study languages, there was a broader political purpose. “The Germans thought that they could quickly beat the British, and then take over the British empire." Once they did that, they would need German officers and bureaucrats to run this empire that sprawled across Africa and Asia, straddling countless cultures and languages. “We must not forget that the RPPC received most of its funding from the German government," Liyanage points out. Evans writes that the RPPC received substantial funds from the Kaiser himself.
Savage points out that it wasn’t just scientists who were curious about these exotic wartime arrivals. “Berliners used to take the trains up to Zossen or Wunstorf to go and see the Indian camps." And then, as if at a human zoo, they would leer at these Sikhs and Gorkhas.
What is even more impressive than the meticulous records is the fact that they exist at all. The written files and notes are in good shape. And the old wax and shellac recordings still produce legible sound (the versions that will be played in the BBC broadcast, however, will have undergone some post-processing). Savage considers the quality of the recordings remarkable: “The wax cylinders actually deteriorate with each play. You can only listen to them so many times." It is purely a matter of fortune that they were found relatively fresh, little used, and just in time to be digitized for posterity.
Also remarkable is that the archives exist in Berlin. Liyanage says that after World War II, the files and voices were taken away by Russian forces, only to be returned after the fall of the Berlin Wall; the recordings and files were rediscovered, in a sense, in the early 2000s. The recordings have since featured in exhibitions and a 2007 documentary film by Philip Scheffner, The Halfmoon Files.
What makes the BBC radio programme essential listening is not the fact that the voices exist, or that they are remarkable to listen to. Earlier this year, Liyanage and Savage compiled a collection of RPPC recordings of Indian soldiers and then decided to travel to India. They would trace the descendants of these soldiers, play the voices back to them, and then see if the recordings rang any bells. Despite the quality of German record-keeping, this proved to be a challenge and a half.
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In one of the recordings, there is a brief moment of static—or digitally scrubbed static, to be more precise—and then PoW Santa Singh starts singing a Hindi song. This RPPC recording dates from 1916. In it, Savage plays the audio from his iPhone to an audience in a village near Amritsar. Listening to Santa Singh’s voice is Jagda Singh, a distant relative who had proved elusive. The BBC crew and their local translator took many hours to pin him down. Later, they are joined by the manager of a local bank. “It was extraordinary," recalls Savage. “We were sitting under a tree, and there he came, riding on his scooter in the twilight."
They listen to Santa Singh’s recording. The bank manager isn’t completely sure if this is the voice of a man who used to once withdraw pension from his bank branch. But another villager is. Santa Singh, it appears, used to sing when he got tipsy. And the voice, the villager said, seemed familiar. This Santa Singh may well be that Santa Singh.
And then Liyanage and Savage move on to their next village, recording in hand.
Liyanage told me that he found the voices quite moving. Not just because they were old. But also because they are of men who went to fight a war they probably never understood.
But what was most moving, he told me, were the looks on the faces of relatives or villagers as they suddenly recognized a long-forgotten voice on an iPhone copy of a wax cylinder from a century ago.
The Ghostly Voices Of World War One will be aired on 9 November, 8-9pm, on BBC World Service Radio.
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