London, September 23

A group of Indian artists, in the UK to mark the centenary of World War I, has claimed they have uncovered documents that reveal bias against the Indian sub-continent soldiers fighting alongside the British Army in the 20th century war.

The Delhi-based artists from the Raqs Media Collective told the ‘Observer’ that papers from the British Library revealed the British forces systematically neglected to treat psychological problems among Indian soldiers and adopted unequal measures in the care of soldiers traumatised by their experiences from the battleground.

“The condition of shell shock was first diagnosed in 1915 by the English doctor Charles Meyers. But documents we found show Meyers quickly dropped the term because it was feared ordinary soldiers would find it easy to understand and so would ask to be seen by medics,” said Shuddhabrata Sengupta of Raqs.“Insted, Meyers suggested a more opaque diagnosis of NYD, or Not Yet Diagnosed — Nervous, which ordinary soldiers would find harder to use,” he said. Sengupta’s team is working on a new art project at Colchester in Essex, commissioned to commemorate the end of World War I — being marked in the UK since 2014 and set to end in November this year.

The term “trench back”, which features in their new installation ‘Not Yet At Ease’, was often adopted to describe symptoms that were actually psychological. “The idea of ‘trench back’ was derived from the condition of ‘railway back’, which was used for people who were thought to have been upset, or jolted, by the speed of rail travel,” said Sengupta. “It was a way of talking about wounds or damage to the spine, instead of mental health. ‘Trench back’ was supposedly caused by being knocked by falling debris in the trenches.”

Records show 1.3 million soldiers from undivided India served in WW-I as part of the British Indian Army. — PTI