“I Too Am Crucial To This Regiment” : Abdul Majid Khan’s Poetics of War in the Boxer Rebellion

Abstract

The last two decades have seen the discovery of further subaltern voices directly involved in entanglements of the global imperial order.^[1] Recent scholarship on the two World Wars has unearthed voices of soldiers of the British Empire exiled to different parts of the world to fight on behalf of their colonial overlords.^[2] However, the involvement of native subjects in the colonial army and their journeys on earlier missions, such as quelling the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) in China, have only recently come to scholarly attention.

My paper analyzes a 76 page “sipāhiyāna safarnāma” (“soldier’s travelogue”) rendered in Urdu verse by Abdul Majid Khan, “veterinary assistant” to 1st Bengal Lancers.^[3] Titled “Natījah-i-Shamshīr” (“The Result of the Sword”), Khan’s poem is a condensed account of the Lancers’ expedition to Peking. Composed in Urdu, then still a leading language of colonial northern India, Khan’s poem enlivens the journey of the soldiers as they encounter rough weather on the sea to facing combat in China, and punctuates his narrative by constantly comparing the sights of Hong Kong and Tianjin to what he has seen back home. My paper aims to foreground Khan’s travelogue and see how it narrativized the Allied expedition, while also trying to investigate the construction (or lack thereof) of colonial subjectivity. It also tries to situate this in conjunction with other Indian accounts of the Boxer rebellion, trying to see whether it provides a “thick description” of subaltern discourse on the Boxer war and broadly on relations between South and East Asia.^[4]