(The following is a post by Jonathan Loar, South Asian reference specialist, Asian Division)
The Library’s Asian Division is pleased to announce the digitization of the Hindi and Urdu editions of “Hindostan,” a propaganda newspaper for South Asian prisoners of war (POWs) held in Germany during World War I. The Asian Division is notable for having nearly complete runs of this pro-German newspaper, which was published in Berlin from March 1915 to August 1918. A total of 159 issues of the Hindi and Urdu editions are now freely available in the South Asian Digital Collection.
The “Hindostan” camp newspaper was part of a unique experiment involving the German Foreign Office, propaganda efforts, and prisoners held at Halbmondlager, or Halfmoon Camp, in Wünsdorf near Berlin. Not long after the start of the war, Germany had established Halbmondlager in December 1914 for a few thousand mainly Muslim soldiers captured from the British, French, and Russian armies. Halbmondlager also housed a separate sub-camp called Inderlager, or India Camp, for a smaller group of several hundred Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim prisoners from British India. The camp’s purpose was to create the setting for delivering pro-German propaganda, with a mix of special provisions and good treatment designed to inspire sympathy for the German cause in the war. (Read more on this topic, including how the architecture of Halbmondlager reflected wartime propaganda, in “Jihad and Islam in World War I,” which is part of the Library’s Open Access Books collection).
For the prisoners held at Halbmondlager, the German Foreign Office’s Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient (Information Center for the Orient) published the POW camp newspaper called “El Dschihad,” or “The Jihad,” with wartime news and articles, albeit from a pro-German perspective. The newspaper had multiple editions reflecting the languages spoken at the camp: Arabic, Georgian, Russian, and Turko-Tartarian. (The Library of Congress has some issues of the Russian edition, too). One of the underlying themes throughout the multiple editions was the German desire to convince the POWs of Germany’s support of their religious and nationalistic struggles.
To that end, the Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient also published the POW camp newspaper in Hindi and Urdu for the South Asian POWs. However, it changed the title to “Hindostan,” a common name for India in both South Asian languages. The idea for this change of title, according to scholarship, came out of the Berlin Indian Independence Committee (IIC), an organization of South Asians in Germany who supported Indian nationalist efforts and cooperated with the German Foreign Office. This was part of the German strategy to stoke the anti-British sensibility of the POWs captured while fighting on behalf of British India’s colonial government. The mastheads of both editions featured the first line of the Urdu poet Muhammad Iqbal’s popular nationalist poem: “Sāre jahāṃ se acchā hindostān hamārā,” or “Better than the whole world is our India.” And the Hindi edition’s masthead added the Sanskrit slogan “Bande mātaram,” or “I praise you, the Motherland” to signal German support for the anticolonial movement in India.
What would POWs find in the pages of the “Hindostan” camp newspaper? Many issues carried news from the battlefields, typically with emphasis on the victories of the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Ottoman Empire) and the disarray of the Allied Powers (United Kingdom, France, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the United States). Frontpage articles from issues in 1915 and 1916 profiled Germany’s new and devastating weaponry (e.g., large artillery, submarines, zeppelins) to convey its military might. World events like the sinking of the RMS Lusitania and the fallout of the Russian Revolution appeared in the pages of “Hindostan” in May 1915 and January 1918, respectively. Other types of articles included those portraying Germany in a positive light and those aiming to turn POWs against the colonial government in British India. For example, the lead story of the May 31, 1916 issue laid out Germany’s material assistance to wounded soldiers accompanied by a photograph of a former soldier and amputee working at a machine shop; the same issue’s front page also reported on the lesson to be learned from Japan’s rise to power in the years before the war in contrast with India’s continued state of subjugation to British control.
Halbmondlager and its camp newspaper were part of a German experiment in wartime propaganda, the goal of which was to convince the POWs to reenter the war and fight with the Central Powers against the Allied Powers. Notably, the Muslim prisoners at Halbmondlager were allowed to read religious texts, observe holidays, and pray in a wooden mosque—in addition to the connections to the outside world provided by the “El Dschihad” and “Hindostan” newspapers. The experiment, though, was not successful, as scholarship estimates only around 2,000 Muslim POWs, including several dozen South Asian POWs, went back into battle. As the war continued, Halbmondlager became one of the wartime sites of German anthropological research on the prisoners and their cultural practices and languages. For more on Halbmondlager and Indian soldiers during World War I, please see the Further Reading Section at the end of this post.
The German Foreign Office published “Hindostan” in its Hindi and Urdu editions from issue one dated March 3, 1915 to issue eighty-four dated August 21, 1918. Most issues were two pages, while some issues, especially toward the end of its run, were four pages. The rate of publication varied between every few days and every two or so weeks. In terms of production, the newspaper was not set in type but rather handwritten and reproduced with photolithography. Different handwriting styles are evident across the issues in both editions.
Please note that the Asian Division’s collection has some gaps. The Hindi edition is missing issues 2, 24, 68, 77, and 81, while the Urdu edition is missing issues 2, 41, 68, and 81. It is hoped that the online accessibility of these nearly complete runs will inspire and assist additional research on the history of South Asia and World War I. For questions about “Hindostan” and any South Asian materials at the Library of Congress, please feel welcome to reach out through Ask a Librarian.
Further Reading:
Ahuja, Ravi. “The Corrosiveness of Comparison: Reverberations of Indian Wartime Experiences in German Prison Camps (1915-1919)” in Heike Liebau, Katrin Bromber, Katharina Lange, Dyala Hamzah, and Ravi Ahuja, eds., The World in World Wars: Experiences, Perceptions and Perspectives from Africa and Asia. Leiden: Brill, c2010.
Chhina, Rana T.S. India and the Great War. New Delhi: Centre for Armed Forces Historical Research, United Service Institution of India, 2015.
Chhina, Rana and Dominiek Dendooven. India in Flanders Fields. New Delhi: Centre for Armed Forces Historical Research, United Service Institution of India, 2017.
Das, Santanu. 1914-1918: Indian Troops in Europe. Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2015.
Kumar, Ashutosh and Claude Markovits, eds. Indian Soldiers in the First World War: Re-visiting a Global Conflict. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2021.
Loar, Jonathan. “Hindostan: A Propaganda Newspaper for South Asian POWs in Germany during World War I.” 4 Corners of the World: International Collections at the Library of Congress. Posted on March 7, 2019.
Roy, Kaushik. Indian Army and the First World War, 1914-18. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Roy, Franziska and Heike Liebau and Ravi Ahuja, eds. When the War Began We Heard of Several Kings: South Asian Prisoners in World War I Germany. New Delhi: Social Science Press, [2011].
- See especially in this volume Heike Liebau’s essay “Hindostan: A Camp Newspaper for South-Asian Prisoners of World War One in Germany,” pp. 231-249.
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