KS4 / GCSE History: Audio recording from Mall Singh - a colonial soldier captured in World War One

When we think of World War One we tend to picture white men in the trenches.

But more than four million black, Asian and North African men also fought in the conflict.

Many of these men were unable to write.

So if we want to unlock some of their experiences of the war we need to look beyond the written word.

I’ve come to this building in Berlin to a place that used to be called the museum of voices, what’s inside here are hundreds of recordings of the voices of men who fought in the first World War.

They came not just from Europe but from right across the world and one of them was a young Indian soldier called Mall Singh.

Here in these meticulously ordered cabinets, live hundreds of ghosts from the first World War.

Mall Singh:
There once was a man, who ate butter in his Hindustan, he also drank milk. He joined the British army, and went into the European war.

David:
It’s beautiful… The voice from another world.

Mall Singh:
Germany captured this man, he wishes to go to India…

David:
When he makes mistakes you can hear him stumble…
Yeah!

Mall Singh:
He wants to go to Hindustan. He will get the same food he had in former times.

David:
The haunting voice belongs to a 24 year old Indian soldier from the Punjab called Mall Singh, he’s telling his own story.

He was part of the India Corps that arrived in France in 1914 to fight for the British.

He’d been taken prisoner by the Germans.

At 4pm on 11th December 1916, Mall Singh was put in front of a horn microphone and told to recite his poem.

The recording brings to life the story of a man transported across continents and oceans to fight in someone else’s war.

The German scientists who made it have no interest in that.

They just wanted a sample of Punjabi dialect to further their research into different racial types.

But it’s only thanks to their obsession with racial cataloguing that a century later we have a sound archive filled with the voices of Mall Singh and hundreds of other colonial soldiers offering a rare glimpse into their experience of the war.

Santanu:
Most of these colonial soldiers were, were non literate or semi literate and they have not left us the super abundance of diariesor poems or letters that form the cornerstone of the European memory of the first World War.

So it’s necessarily a history of fragments, it’s a history of fugitive moments that has to be very carefully recovered analysed and put pressure on and because there are so few they are all the more precious.

Mall Singh:
Three long years have passed… If this man is forced to stay here for two more years, he will die.