The Home and the World: War-Torn Landscape and Literary Imagination of a Bengali Military Doctor in Mesopotamia During World War I

Samraghni Bonnerjee

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)
15 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Over one million Indians served in the First World War. A doctor from Calcutta, Captain Kalyan Mukherji, meticulously recorded his displacement from Bengal to Mesopotamia in the form of letters written to his mother. This chapter examines how Mukherji imagined, encountered and experienced the war-torn Mesopotamian landscape. It demonstrates how, equipped with an English education and exposure to European cultural hegemony in Bengal, Mukherji negotiated his disappointment with the war-ravaged landscape, by practising a version of Orientalism (in Said’s terms) and by performing ‘colonial mimicry’, in applying English poetic imagery to imagine the gardens of Basra and Baghdad. The chapter establishes how Mukherji attempted to reconcile himself with the real Mesopotamian landscape, by offering a scathing indictment of patriotism as ‘seizing a piece of land’, thus condemning the colonial ambitions of the British, and prefiguring Rabindranath Tagore’s wariness about nationalism in his 1916 novel The Home and the World.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLandscapes of the First World War
EditorsSelena Daly, Martina Salvante, Vanda Wilcox
Place of PublicationCham, Switzerland
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Pages157-170
ISBN (Electronic)9783319894119
ISBN (Print)9783319894102
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 13 Aug 2018
Externally publishedYes

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