A group of leading Indian artists, in Britain to help commemorate the end of the first world war, says it has uncovered evidence of historic racism involving the care of soldiers traumatised by their experiences.
Combatants from the Indian subcontinent, along with many of those from what were then described as “lower social orders”, were not officially recognised as suffering from shell shock – a syndrome that is now covered by the term post-traumatic stress disorder, they say.
The artists, from Delhi and known as Raqs Media Collective, said that original documents uncovered in the British Library revealed that the armed forces systematically neglected to treat psychological problems among Indian soldiers.
Shuddhabrata Sengupta of Raqs, who are creating an artwork in Colchester commissioned by the arts body 14-18 Now for the Essex town’s Firstsite arts venue, said that British commanding officers appeared to use both class and race to ration mental health care during recuperation periods. “The condition of shell shock was first diagnosed in 1915 by the English doctor Charles Meyers,” said Sengupta. “But documents we found in the British Library 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.
“Instead Meyers suggested a more opaque diagnosis of NYD, or Not Yet Diagnosed – Nervous, which ordinary soldiers would find harder to use.”
The term “trench back”, which features in the art collective’s new piece Not Yet At Ease, was often adopted to describe symptoms that were actually psychological.
“The idea of ‘trench back’ derived from the earlier 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.”
In the summer of 1915, Captain John D Sandes, the officer in charge of electrotherapy at the temporary Kitchener Indian Hospital set up in Brighton, described his diagnosis of trench back in the British Medical Journal: “In a certain proportion a pronounced psychical factor can be traced, and these cases present features similar in many respects to the condition known as ‘railway spine’ and are always difficult to treat.”
Further reports written by the chief censor of Indian military correspondence in France, Evelyn Berkeley Howell, chronicle the increasing depression suffered by Indian soldiers: “Many of the men show a tendency to break into poetry which I am inclined to regard as a rather ominous sign of mental disquietude. The number of letters written by men who have obviously given way to despair has also increased both absolutely and relatively.”
Sengupta believes that the art installation in Colchester is the first public admission of these dubious wartime diagnoses outside scholarly circles. He and his fellow artists have created a twisting complex of padded cells to represent the treatment cells in the first world war hospitals. “But they also follow the form of the trenches themselves, which were labyrinthine. We are also creating a palimpsest of sounds, including readings from these official reports and fragments of a novel, with film footage and photos,” he said.