Existing histories of soldiers in the Indian Army during the First World War offer limited sustained engagement with material culture. This is due in part to the value placed by scholars of the Indian Army on first-hand, written testimony, and on other primary sources treated as textual repositories of voice and agency. This thesis considers what might be learned instead from exploring the materialities of primary sources, and poses the research question: How can the study of material culture add to the histories of the men that served in the Indian Army during the First World War? The result is an extensive study of bodiliness, both as a subject matter and as a method of historical enquiry. By examining the bodily materialities of soldiers and their associated practices, this thesis draws on an entanglement of plural critical lenses and worldviews to offer new insights into the experiences of Indian Army soldiers during this period. Moreover, this thesis looks to decolonial and Black feminist scholarships in developing original methodologies of bodiliness, which form a key part of this thesis’s objective to research and write histories otherwise.

This thesis explores how an interrogation of bodily materialities and bodily methodologies might bring new insights into sources located firmly within the imperial archive(s). These include photographs, film, sound, objects, existing archival oral histories, and the well- known series of Censor of Indian Mails reports, housed variously across the sound archive at the Berlin Humboldt-Universität, the British Library’s India Office Records and British Newspaper Archive, the Horniman Museum, and the Imperial War Museum, amongst others. It is not the aim of this thesis to expand the repository of primary materials available to historians of the Indian Army; rather, it considers how historians might reimagine these existing sources by using them in otherwise ways. In doing so, definitions of material culture grounded in objecthood also become unstable, and as such this thesis considers what it means for design historians to research material cultures inflected with non-human and non-object agencies.

This thesis is structured across three chapters. Chapter 1 examines the material cultures of that which is worn ‘with’ the body, including miniaturised Qur’ans, mala beads, pagri head wrappings, and hair itself. It considers what might be learned from the material dimensions of how soldiers lived in relation to others, including non-human and immaterial agencies, and their peers. Chapter 2 examines the materialities of sound and sounding, and explores the enunciations of bodiliness across different registers of sound(ing). This chapter attends to the shifting nature of both sonic sources and bodiliness, and opens the thesis’s wider enquiry into how the historian’s own bodiliness can play an intentional methodological role in encountering the archive. Chapter 3 considers the materialities of movement, specifically relating to kushti, comic entertainment, prayer, and devotional theatre. The chapter explores how bringing Indian cosmologies from the period to bear on primary sources, and how encountering sources through the bodily methodologies, might offer new conclusions on soldiers’ lived experiences.