In 1940s India, revolutionary and nationalistic feeling surged against colonial subjecthood and imperial war. Two-and-a-half million men from undivided India served the British during the Second World War, while three million civilians were killed by the war-induced Bengal Famine, and Indian National Army soldiers fought against the British for Indian independence.

This lecture uses the lens of emotions as a way of unearthing the troubled and contested roles of Indian men and women during wartime, exposing the personal as political. I look at photographs, letters, memoirs, novels, poetry and philosophical essays, in both English and Bengali languages, to recover a complex range of emotions felt by Indians in service and at home during the war. Seen through Indian eyes, this conflict no longer remains the ‘good’ war.

Educated at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, University of Cambridge and King's College London, UK, Dr Diya Gupta is a literary and cultural historian interested in how visual culture, life-writing and literature respond to war. She is currently Lecturer in Public History at City, University of London, and was formerly Past & Present Fellow: Race, Ethnicity and Equality in History at the Royal Historical Society and the Institute of Historical Research.

Her first book, 'India in the Second World War: An Emotional History' (Hurst Publishers and Oxford University Press, 2023), recovers and assesses an emotional history of undivided India during the Second World War. Here, alongside colonial photographs, she studies letters, memoirs, political philosophy and literary texts in Bengali and English languages to reveal the complexities of Indian war emotions.

Please register at: events.gbz@hu-berlin.de. When registering please state if you wish to attend in person or via Zoom.