WORLD WAR I • 1914–1918 ✧ NEVER SENT

Letters Across the Indus

Havildar Amar Singh (age 28)

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Priya Devi (age 24)

1916-04-15 3 min read Siege of Kut Kut, Mesopotamia (now Iraq)

#indian #colonial #mesopotamia #1916 #unsent #commonwealth

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Kut, Mesopotamia (now Iraq) • 1916-04-15

Havildar Amar Singh

to Priya Devi

My beloved Priya,

I write this letter with a hand that trembles, not from fear but from hunger. We have been surrounded in this ancient city for four months now. The river is still here — the Tigris, the great river of Babylon — but the food is gone. We eat the horses. We eat the mules. We grind grain into dust and make a paste that fills the belly but not the soul.

The sahibs say the relief force is coming. They have said this for weeks. I look east every morning and see only the sun rising over the desert. The very earth remembers its children here, Priya. This is the land of two rivers, of ancient kings and prophets. Abraham walked here. The gardens of Babylon were here. And here we sit, men from the hills of Kumaon, dying in a land that does not know our names.

I think of the Ganges every day. Of the snow on Nanda Devi, the peak I could see from our village when I was a boy. I think of the sound of the river after the monsoon, and the smell of the earth when the first rain hits the dry ground. I think of you carrying water from the well, the way you balanced the pot on your head and walked so straight and proud.

Tell Arjun — our son — tell him his father loved him. I have not seen his face for so long that I have to close my eyes to remember it. If I do not return, name the next one after me. Amar. Let the name live on.

मैं तुमसे कभी अलग नहीं हुआ। मेरी आत्मा हर रात पूरब की ओर तुम्हारे पास उड़ती है। जब तक यह शरीर धूल में मिल न जाए, तब तक मेरा प्यार तुम्हारे साथ रहेगा।

(I have never truly left you. My soul flies east to you every night. Until this body returns to dust, my love will remain with you.)

We are camped near the ruins of an ancient city. The men say it was here that the great king Nebuchadnezzar walked. The soil is black and rich, older than anything I have ever seen. I scooped a handful of it today and let it run through my fingers. It felt like home. All earth is the same earth, Priya. All soil holds the bones of those who loved and were loved.

Do not weep for me. If I die here, I die fighting for my people, for my regiment, for the honour of the Dogras. I die with your name on my lips.

Yours always, across every river and every mountain, Amar

Written in Hindi in a neat, soldierly hand on a page torn from an army-issue notebook. The paper is water-stained and brittle. The letter was recovered by British forces when Kut was retaken in February 1917. It bears the War Office archive stamp from 2002.

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What Happened

Havildar Amar Singh surrendered with the Kut garrison on April 29, 1916. He was among approximately 11,000 British and Indian troops taken prisoner by the Ottoman forces. The prisoners were force-marched north toward Anatolia — a distance of over 1,200 kilometres. The march became a death march. Amar died of starvation and dysentery in August 1916, somewhere near the town of Ras al-Ain in modern-day Syria. He was 28 years old. His body was buried by the roadside by fellow prisoners who could not mark the grave for fear of reprisal. The letter never reached Priya. It was found by British soldiers retaking Kut in February 1917, among the debris of the Turkish command post, and was filed in the India Office Records.

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Aftermath

Priya Devi never learned Amar's fate. The British War Office listed him as "missing, presumed dead." She raised their son, Arjun, alone in their village near Almora, Kumaon. She waited for Amar until her last breath — she refused to perform the rituals of widowhood, insisting that until she saw his body, he might still come home. She died in 1975 at the age of 83. The letter lay unrecognised in the British Library's India Office Records until 2019, when Amar's great-grandson, a historian at the University of Delhi, discovered it while researching Indian involvement in the Mesopotamian campaign. He published it in 2020. The letter received international attention as a rare surviving testimony of an Indian soldier in the Great War.

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Historical Context

The Indian Army in World War I was one of the largest volunteer forces in history. Over 1.4 million Indian soldiers served on the Western Front, at Gallipoli, in East Africa, and in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). The Mesopotamian campaign was a British attempt to secure oil fields and protect supply routes. The Siege of Kut (December 7, 1915 – April 29, 1916) was one of the longest sieges in British military history. A combined British and Indian force of approximately 30,000 men was surrounded by Ottoman forces in the town of Kut-al-Amara. Relief attempts failed repeatedly. Starvation, disease, and desertion decimated the garrison. By the time of surrender, horses and mules had been eaten, and the men were surviving on a handful of grain per day. The surrender was the largest British capitulation since Yorktown in 1781. Of the 13,000 Allied soldiers taken prisoner, over 4,000 died in captivity or during forced marches.

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Timeline

1914-08-04

Britain declares war. India, as a British colony, is automatically at war. The Indian Army mobilises.

1915-06-01

Amar receives his mobilisation order. He leaves his village in Kumaon for the first time in his life.

1915-11-01

Amar's regiment, the 39th Dogras, arrives in Basra, Mesopotamia.

1915-12-07

The Siege of Kut begins. The garrison is surrounded by Ottoman forces.

1916-04-15

Amar writes this letter. Food has run out. Men are eating grass and boiled boots.

1916-04-29

Kut surrenders. 13,000 Allied soldiers become prisoners of war.

1916-05-06

The death march begins. Prisoners are marched north toward Anatolia without food or water.

1916-08-01

Amar dies of starvation and disease during the march. He is buried in an unmarked grave.

1917-02-25

British forces retake Kut. Amar's letter is found among the debris.

2002-09-01

The letter is catalogued at the British Library, India Office Records.

2019-03-01

Amar's great-grandson discovers the letter and publishes it.

Origin

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