News
A year after launching our website we have made steady progress in knocking it into shape. Numbers of ‘hits’ continue to grow and the number of on-line applications for membership has been most welcome. We have now added a PayPal link to our system so that members and potential members, whether based in the UK or elsewhere in the world, can more easily pay the subscription fee using their own credit or debit card (details from the Membership Secretary). After much effort by some of our members we will soon be posting back issues of Durbar on a new open ARCHIVE page. This will include all journals up to and including 2006. Journals from 2007 onwards will only be available to members. The ARCHIVE page will also contain articles or documents that might not be suitable for the format of the journal and the first of these, “The 129th Duke of Connaught’s Own Baluchis at Kibata, German East Africa - October 1916 to January 1917” by Harry Fecitt will be put up soon, along with some modern photographs taken by Harry of the area. You are free to use any of this material, but should you intend to publish anything based on the material we would be grateful if you would acknowledge IMHS as the source.
We continue to add to the LINKS page, intended to gather together major military historical organisations such as The National Army Museum and the Imperial War Museum as well as kindred research organisations. We hope this will help members and visitors to our site and save them time searching for these sites individually. If you have a site you feel would be useful to members, or visitors to this site, please let us know.
We have left here a reference to an article in The Express Tribune about a 35-volume series languishing in the basement of the Lahore Museum: LAHORE - The Great War chronicles the beginnings and ends of over 100,000 Indian soldiers who served in the British Army during the First World War. It notes their family and caste, date of birth, where they were born and brought up, their acts of bravery in battle, and how and when they were hurt or killed. The 35-volume series, bound in green leather, lies locked and stacked in a cupboard in the basement of the Lahore Museum. “It is a rare collection,” says Ahmed Bashir Bhatti, the senior librarian. “There are no copies. We have many rare books.” None of the committee has ever heard of such a chronicle. Click HERE to read the full article.
See Text Archive logo on the Links page.
Several members of the Society have written books on aspects of Indian military history and these, along with links to their publishers, are featured on the BOOKS page.
BRITISH COMMISISON FOR MILTARY HISTORY - SUMMER CONFERENCE 2012
The conference will take place at Keble College, Oxford, from 20th–22nd July 2012. Proposals (c.200 words) are invited from established scholars and doctoral researchers for papers of 20 minutes on subjects related to the history of Indian armies and warfare on the sub-continent and beyond.
Please click here to download a pdf document with full details.