The First World War and the All-India War Memorial

Commemoration, Memorialization and the Creation of the Public Sphere

Abstract

This article explores the concept of the ‘public sphere’, focusing on its development and manifestation in colonial India. It juxtaposes Jürgen Habermas's Eurocentric framework of the public sphere with critiques and adaptations from South Asian scholars, who argue that the concept needs to be re-contextualized to account for local socio-political and cultural specificities. Through the lens of the ‘All-India War Memorial’ inaugural ceremony held in 1931 to commemorate the native soldiers who died in World War I and the Anglo-Afghan Wars, the article highlights how the colonial state used institutional-structural practices, such as commemoration ceremonies, to actively produce the public sphere to manifest British dominance, highlighting the interconnectedness between imperial state actions and public opinion formation. The commemoration of Indian soldiers of the First World War was an elaborate imperial spectacle that reinforced British colonial hegemony while marginalizing Indian agency. This disconnect between the imperial and nationalist narratives continued to influence post-colonial India's struggle with the memory of those who fought the Empire’s war on a global platform from 1914-1918. Ultimately, the memorial became a symbolic British imperial monument of ‘selective remembering’ rather than a space for ‘collective memorialisation’ in post-colonial India.